The flexibility of ALEKS can be daunting - it's easy to spin your wheels trying to decide what to do next.  To meet your math preparation goals, you'll need a study structure. You need to set a schedule, find or create a good study environment, identify your incremental progress targets, and pick out some nice rewards for hitting those targets. 

Think about your previous learning experiences - school, work, sports, service, ..., any situation where you needed to master important new skills - and focus on a few of the most rewarding experiences and a few of the most frustrating ones. What made things click? What bogged things down? Write your thoughts down, or record them; come back to your notes or recording a day later, and revisit the issues you noted earlier. 

Define your incremental goals sufficiently clearly that it's always obvious whether or not you've met your latest target. Fuzzy goals don't work, because ambiguity and uncertainty are stressful, and if you can avoid a stressful situation, you probably will.

Setting goals isn't about being tough with yourself. It's about being good to yourself. Meeting a sequence of incremental goals will give you lots of small pay-offs that will keep you moving forward, and that cumulative progress will have a huge reward. You need to know that you've successfully completed your task, because that knowledge will make you a little bit happy, and being happy is good. Linking happiness to studying math will make it much easier to study math.

Two simple goal types are well-suited for studying using ALEKS: time-based and progress-based. To see which of these criteria might work well for you, consider your approach to domestic chores. When tackling house or yardwork, do you typically work for a certain amount of time (either by the clock or until you're tired) and get as far as you can in that time, or do you pick out particular tasks and work until they're completed, no matter how long or short a time you need to complete them? Neither approach is better - they're just different. If you tell yourself you're going to work until the task is done, but tend to slow down and get distracted after awhile, count yourself as a by-the-clock person.

Map out blocks of time in your daily schedule for working in your Learning Module, for watching tutorial videos, and for assessing your study habits and progress.  Take advantage of the 24/7 availability of ALEKS - choose times that work for you, even if they're not during traditional school or study hours. Frequent short study sessions are typically much more effective than a few long sessions.  

Exploit your existing routines when building new ones. For example, you may decide that on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings you'll work in ALEKS for half an hour and work out for half an hour, instead of working out for a full hour; set an evening study block while the rest of your family is watching a show that they think is terrific, but that you think is boring ("sorry, mom... got to study math").

Look carefully at your ALEKS pie, or any other representation of your current mastery and progress.  Select topics you want to review or learn from among those that ALEKS tells you you're ready to make rapid progress with. If there are topics you want to study that ALEKS doesn't think you're quite ready for, know that they'll become available as you progress.

Working clockwise around the pie will take you through the topics in a traditional sequence, but everyone's different when it comes to deciding what's difficult. Some people are intimidated by abstract concepts, but are very good at crunching through long calculations; other people get tangled up in arithmetic, but have terrific geometric intuition.  A good strategy is to start with something you find relatively easy, to get into the swing of things, then ramp up to more challenging material.

Once you've set up a detailed study schedule, commit to it. Resist the temptation to skip studying just this one time, ignore social media while you're studying, and boot any doubts about whether any of this is really going to make a difference into the insecurities dumpster where they belong. It will make a big difference. If you're restless, maybe a little bored, jump to something more challenging for a study session; it you've got a lot of stressful or distracting things going on in your life, work on something you're comfortable with until things settle down.

If you can't focus during a session, don't stare at your Learning Module waiting for the clock to run out - do something else mathematical: watch a few tutorial videos, or some fun math videos (they exist), or concoct a word problem describing something you've done or thought about that day (NSFW word problems are great for those days when you just can't seem to concentrate).

Committing to your plan doesn't mean that you can't change it. If you aren't making enough progress to meet your end of summer goals to meet your session goal, then you may need to change your strategies or add some extra study sessions to your schedule. If you frequently don't have time to meet your session goal, or your study schedule is harming your work or social life, then you may need to dial back your learning targets. If you're consistently meeting your goals with amply time and energy to spare, consider kicking it up a notch. If life tosses some surprises your way, reset your priorities. ALEKS will be here for you when you're ready to come back.