Problem in 12 months 7 Assessments

Final yr I blogged concerning the rules behind the design of our Key Stage 3 assessments and shared some examples of difficult questions for 12 months 8 and 12 months 9. I wrote new assessments this yr (to keep away from the sharing of examination papers with youthful siblings!). I am going to share a few of the more difficult 12 months 7 questions on this put up.

This yr we took a number of our evaluation questions from AQA’s Key Stage 3 Assessments on All About Maths. I do not know why I’ve by no means used these earlier than. They’re glorious.

This is the final query on our 12 months 7 non-calculator evaluation:

This query checks reasoning abilities, and fluency in substitution (i.e. understanding the notation 2p and 3q) and dealing with directed quantity (as a result of the least doable worth is a adverse quantity). It is a precursor to working with sure calculations (the thought of ‘small minus large equals small’). It is an accessible query that everybody can try, however few college students received full marks. I anticipated to see lengthy lists of trial and error makes an attempt, however truly most college students simply answered -11, the place they’d assumed they need to use 11 for each p and q.

This is one other query that challenged 12 months 7:

This requires reasoning (working backwards from the imply) and information of prime numbers. Many college students struggled with working backwards from the imply – educating time is so tight at Key Stage 3, we simply did not have as a lot time as we would have appreciated to develop reasoning abilities by means of averages puzzles.

This is one other reasoning query that some 12 months 7 college students discovered difficult.

I am assured that the overwhelming majority of our college students can add one fifth and one sixth, however many did not get the mark for step one as a result of they did not try it. This query requires fraction abilities, proportional reasoning and the interpretation of a worded drawback.

This is an angles drawback that they discovered tougher than I anticipated them to. We might practised comparable questions from MathsPad and Don Steward in school. I am assured that they know their angle info, so it is the reasoning moderately than the underlying information that received in the best way right here.

Our college students had much more success with the query under – a talent we had devoted a while to in classes. Forming equations to unravel geometry issues is such an essential drawback fixing talent, we do a number of observe of this in 12 months 7 and eight. It additionally helps that it isn’t a wordy query.

With this subsequent query, it was interpretation of the data given (the perimeter of the massive triangle) after which understanding of what the query was asking (for the perimeter of the entire form – which does not embody any of the inside traces) which precipitated issue.

Lastly, the final query on the calculator paper was designed to problem our highest attainers. Many college students picked up marks on the primary two components, however solely two college students in the entire yr group confirmed an accurate strategy to the ultimate half. This examined their information of calculating a imply from a desk and fixing equations. I tailored this query from a Hong Kong examination paper (see Gems 168).

My Key Stage 3 assessments are right here if you would like to see the papers for Years 7 – 9. Be aware that I did not write the questions myself – they’re from numerous sources. Lots of the questions are from the AQA Key Stage 3 assessments. There’s a lot of problem in these assessments, however we do not speed up past the subjects on our schemes of labor. Nobody received 100% in 12 months 8 and 9, however we did have one 12 months 7 scholar get full marks. Spectacular!