Resourceaholic: Yr 8 Evaluation Questions

This 12 months I produced our finish of 12 months assessments for Yr 8 and 9. We now have a number of primary ideas that we comply with after we create our Key Stage 3 assessments: 

• Single Tier Key Stage 3 Assessments. I do know this one is controversial, however I need each scholar within the 12 months group to take the identical evaluation. I’ve by no means been pleased with prematurely allocating college students to tiers in Key Stage 3. Once we’ve carried out that previously, I’ve discovered that college students find yourself getting ‘caught’ in sure units. So now, though our common end-of-topic exams are tailor-made to every class, our huge assessments (twice a 12 months) are one-size-fits-all. This makes the assessments harder to jot down, however helps us get a greater sense of relative attainment throughout the entire 12 months group.
• Testing All Taught Content material. We all know it is irritating for college students to spend ages studying and revising subjects which can be then not examined. So we attempt to embody questions from each matter taught through the 12 months. And we’d by no means check on subjects not but taught – that is counterproductive (it damages confidence and tells us nothing). Because of this we do not give full increased tier GCSE papers on the finish of Yr 10 – I am strongly against it. 
• Testing Data, Ability and Reasoning. We need to check procedural fluency and reasoning expertise, however we do not imagine there is a strict separation between this stuff. Nicely-written questions check each, so we attempt to discover as a lot of these as we will.
• Problem. It is so essential to incorporate an excellent stage of problem. I can not stand it when college students end a 60 minute evaluation in 20 minutes after which sit there trying bored as a result of they discovered it straightforward. There must be loads of questions that make them assume. And provided that the outcomes of those assessments assist us decide the teams we’ll put college students in subsequent 12 months, we want our assessments to offer us with sufficient data to get these choices proper. If half the 12 months group get 90%+, it is not serving to us establish our strongest mathematicians.

Query Model

I haven’t got time to jot down lots of the questions myself. Fortunately there are many good questions round, and instruments like Dr Frost imply they’re simply accessible. Here is an instance of a query that’s nicely suited to a single tier Key Stage 3 evaluation:

That is from a WJEC Basis paper. What I like about that is that Half a may be very accessible to all college students with a calculator. So the overwhelming majority of scholars can get a mark right here. Half b requires an understanding of inverse operations. A few of our decrease attaining college students discovered that harder than we anticipated them to.

Here is an analogous one. I tailored this from an previous AQA GCSE query. The vast majority of college students received Half a appropriate. However Half b required a bit extra pondering, and it stunned me that many college students received it improper, suggesting we have to work on their proportional reasoning.

Questions with a number of elements the place the primary half is extremely accessible and the elements get more and more tough are excellent for single tier assessments. Ideally each paper would full of those, then you do not find yourself with the scenario the place some college students can solely do the primary 4 questions and may’t entry the remainder of the paper. Here is one other instance of a query that has each accessible and difficult elements:

Maybe this ramps up in problem too shortly. There could possibly be an extra half between b and c with reasonable difficultly.

If a paper is stuffed with questions like this then it is each accessible and difficult. Subsequent 12 months I need to embody extra of this. This 12 months my paper ended up with the basic format ‘simpler questions firstly, more durable questions on the finish’, which does not create a pleasant expertise for the decrease attaining college students.

Within the the rest of this publish I need to share a few of the harder questions I included in my Yr 8 assessments. A few of our excessive attainers stated they discovered the mid-year evaluation too straightforward, and I did not need a repeat of that. 

Circles

There’s completely no must speed up onto the formulaic ^θ/₃₆₀ πr² when there’s a lot reasoning to be carried out in Yr 8 with semi circles and quarter circles.

To check these reasoning expertise I included this query within the non-calculator evaluation (taken from OCR’s pattern GCSE questions):

And this query within the calculator evaluation (I can not bear in mind the supply of this one – I believe it is likely to be Edexcel?):

Even our perfect Yr 8 mathematicians discovered these questions difficult. In my very shiny Set 2, no scholar received a couple of mark on both query. This implies we nonetheless have work to do on creating their reasoning. 

Fractions

Though this wasn’t probably the most difficult questions on my Yr 8 evaluation, I made a decision to offer this query a point out right here as a result of it stunned me. Fractions questions are sometimes so procedural, I needed to incorporate a fractions query that took a bit extra pondering. Though the overwhelming majority of scholars in my class haven’t any bother including, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions, this query was answered very badly. Even halving 5 eighths proved conceptually difficult. 

Quantity

There are many ‘excessive tariff’ quantity questions to select from. These are good for a single-tier assessments as a result of most college students ought to have the ability to decide up some of the 4 or 5 marks out there even when they cannot full the entire query. 

This cylinder query (tailored from AQA) stumped most of my college students. All of them accurately labored out the quantity of water within the Cylinder A, however then discovered the quantity of the entire of Cylinder B and divided one quantity by the opposite. This can be a basic instance of scholars following a formulaic strategy to answering a query, slightly than stopping to consider what the query truly says.

Interweaving

As a lot as attainable I attempted to search out questions which mixed a couple of matter they’d studied this 12 months. That is notably straightforward to do for Pythagoras and ratio, which each come up in every single place. For instance, this query mixed ratio and percentages:

This was initially an IMC query. Are you able to guess what went improper? Most college students in my class simplified 45:55 as a substitute of simplifying 100:155 (or equal). They’ve the data they should reply this query accurately. They simply did not assume.

That they had way more success on this ‘drawback fixing’ type query on the non-calculator paper which additionally concerned ratio and percentages.

Andrew is paid £250 every week.

Every week, he:

– shares his pay along with his sister within the ratio 3 : 2

– saves 12% of his share.

What number of weeks will it take Andrew to avoid wasting £360?

That is an AQA GCSE query from 2014. It was carried out fairly nicely.

And although we might hung out on questions similar to this again in December, not a single scholar in my class picked up any marks on this non-calculator query:

This can be a SQA specimen query however I added the requirement to reply with out indices so as to add additional problem. It interweaves index legal guidelines, fractions and increasing brackets. All three subjects have been on our Yr 8 curriculum.

Though we do numerous work on fractional and damaging indices in Yr 10, we do look briefly at damaging indices in Yr 8. So the upper attaining college students ought to know that x^-1 = ¹/_x  and x⁰ = 1. They did not get this far although. Just a few college students realised that they need to be including the indices, however they appeared to panic on the considered including 1/2 to -3/2. Now I give it some thought, I bear in mind A stage college students discovering this type of factor tough after we used to show C1 too. Maybe that is one thing to spend extra time on after we do fractions, as a substitute of skipping over fractions with widespread denominators.

*****

I’ve featured a variety of GCSE questions right here, however I ought to emphasise that our Key Stage 3 assessments draw on quite a few sources, together with previous Key Stage 2 SATs questions and previous Key Stage 3 questions. Something that is proper for our college students goes in, we’re not valuable about what it was initially written for. I want I had extra time to jot down my very own questions.

I would like to see a few of the questions that the majority challenged your Key Stage 3 college students of their assessments this 12 months, so do tweet me some examples. 

I will write an analogous publish quickly about a few of the questions I used to problem Yr 9.

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For context, I work at a complete college within the London Borough of Sutton. There are 5 grammar colleges in our borough, which barely reduces our consumption of excessive attainers. We’re proudly non-selective. It is a pretty prosperous space so solely 14% of our college students are pupil premium. We’re fairly ethnically various (41% White British in comparison with 66% nationally). We now have 22 college students with EHCPs. We’re a brand new college with round 200 college students per 12 months group and we presently solely have Years 7 – 10 (we’ll have Yr 11 subsequent 12 months). Basically, most of our college students have glorious attitudes to studying and need to do nicely. The typical rating on our finish of Yr 8 evaluation was 57% and the best rating was 95%.