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Final week I blogged about our Year 8 assessments. I set out the ideas we observe once we write our Key Stage 3 assessments, and I shared examples of the questions that challenged our highest attaining college students.
Right now’s put up is about 12 months 9. My college’s 12 months 9 cohort has a really wide selection of maths attainment, which was additional exacerbated by the lockdowns in 12 months 7 and eight. One notable function of this 12 months group is how extremely good the excessive attaining college students are. The highest set trainer finds it laborious work to sufficiently problem them in classes. So once I made the top of 12 months evaluation, I had to make sure there have been loads of questions in there to make them suppose. I do not need anybody popping out of a maths evaluation bragging that they discovered it very easy.
Listed here are a number of the tougher questions from our finish of 12 months 9 evaluation.
Ratio
At a live performance the ratio of males to ladies is 5 : 3.
The ratio of girls to kids is 7 : 4.
Present that greater than half of the folks on the live performance are males.
A tougher ratio query was this one from Edexcel, which additionally examined one other 12 months 9 subject: altering the topic.
The ratio (y + x) : (y – x) is equal to ok : 1.
Discover a formulation for y when it comes to ok and x.
Floor Space
Floor space is a good subject as a result of it presents many alternatives for drawback fixing and reasoning. For instance, this basic query might have been pretty simple for a excessive attainer, however I like the best way it is also accessible to anybody who does a little bit of pondering. I used to be delighted that a number of college students in my class labored this out. We put it in our non-calculator paper so it additionally examined their arithmetic.
The entire floor space of a dice is 294cm2.
Work out the amount of the dice.
A barely tougher query was this one from Edexcel. It would not have any notably difficult reasoning in it, however has obtained a a number of steps to work by way of, together with unit conversion which is perhaps missed. I like questions the place college students must determine that they should work with floor space relatively than quantity.
Probably the most difficult floor space query I included was this one from AQA. Only a few college students may do that, even our highest attainers. We’ll revisit questions like this in 12 months 10.
Bounds
I like this coal query from WJEC. In 12 months 9 we train bounds and error intervals for the primary time. We introduce some fundamental bounds calculations, however go into larger depth on this at GCSE. This query fitted completely. Nonetheless, I believed our college students would discover it simpler than they did. I had it close to the beginning of the paper, however most the scholars in my class solely picked up one mark on it. My college students are all working at a Grade 4 stage although. Our greater attaining college students had no drawback with this one.
Chance
We taught Venn Diagrams to 12 months 9 this 12 months. There have been some pretty simple Venn diagram questions nearer the beginning of our finish of 12 months evaluation, the place college students mainly simply needed to full numerous Venn Diagrams. However for problem I wished to check understanding of notation in addition to likelihood, so I tailored an OCR AS stage query. Solely our easiest mathematicians answered this appropriately.
Algebraic Proportion
Algebraic proportion may be extremely procedural. So long as college students learn the query fastidiously, as soon as they know the best way to do it, it is nearly a assured 5 marks. So I included a non-calculator proportion query that was a bit completely different to questions they’d seen earlier than. What I appreciated about this was the accessibility: nobody from my class obtained all of the marks, however they did handle to choose up one or two.
Proper-Angled Trigonometry
This query was my pièce de résistance. I figured that if our tremendous intelligent 12 months 9s breezed by way of all the opposite difficult questions I threw at them, they might certainly must cease and suppose at this level. This SQA query is designed to be solved utilizing the Sine Rule. However our college students do not do the Sine Rule till 12 months 10. This query may be achieved with right-angled trigonometry. The best way I did it was by splitting the bottom into x and 350 – x, then forming two equations for the peak and equating them. Even when our college students managed to get this far, fixing the equation could be pretty difficult for them as a result of they have not seen something like this earlier than.
Because it occurred, none of our 12 months 9s managed to resolve it in the best way I envisaged. However one very good scholar got here up with a genius (albeit inefficient!) technique of trial and enchancment. I yelped with pleasure once I realised what he’d achieved:
It is such a delight to see college students utilizing inventive approaches like this.
I additionally discovered some nice difficult questions involving normal kind and percentages, however I’ll cease at this level in any other case this weblog put up will go on perpetually! Like I stated in my final put up, there are quite a few locations we are able to discover good evaluation questions for Key Stage 3. It is a disgrace they don’t seem to be centrally produced anymore – the previous KS3 SATs contained nice questions, however no less than we are able to nonetheless draw on these to make our personal assessments.
When you’ve got any good 12 months 9 evaluation questions you’d wish to share, please tweet me.
Thanks for studying!
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