Final week I blogged about our Yr 8 assessments. I set out the rules we observe after we write our Key Stage 3 assessments, and I shared examples of the questions that challenged our highest attaining college students.
Right now’s submit is about Yr 9. My faculty’s Yr 9 cohort has a really big selection of maths attainment, which was additional exacerbated by the lockdowns in Yr 7 and eight. One notable characteristic of this 12 months group is how extremely good the excessive attaining college students are. The highest set instructor finds it arduous 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 few of the tougher questions from our finish of Yr 9 evaluation.
Ratio
At a live performance the ratio of males to ladies is 5 : 3.
The ratio of ladies to youngsters is 7 : 4.
Present that greater than half of the individuals on the live performance are males.
A tougher ratio query was this one from Edexcel, which additionally examined one other Yr 9 matter: altering the topic.
The ratio (y + x) : (y – x) is equal to ok : 1.
Discover a system for y when it comes to ok and x.
Floor Space
Floor space is a good matter as a result of it presents many alternatives for drawback fixing and reasoning. For instance, this basic query could have been pretty easy for a excessive attainer, however I like the best way it is also accessible to anybody who does a little bit of considering. I used to be delighted that a couple of college students in my class labored this out. We put it in our non-calculator paper so it additionally examined their arithmetic.
The whole 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 significantly difficult reasoning in it, however has bought a a number of steps to work via, together with unit conversion which is likely to be missed. I like questions the place college students need to determine that they should work with floor space somewhat 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 Yr 10.
Bounds
I like this coal query from WJEC. In Yr 9 we educate bounds and error intervals for the primary time. We introduce some primary bounds calculations, however go into better depth on this at GCSE. This query fitted completely. Nevertheless, 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.
Likelihood
We taught Venn Diagrams to Yr 9 this 12 months. There have been some pretty easy Venn diagram questions nearer the beginning of our finish of 12 months evaluation, the place college students mainly simply needed to full varied Venn Diagrams. However for problem I needed to check understanding of notation in addition to chance, so I tailored an OCR AS stage query. Solely our highest mathematicians answered this appropriately.
Algebraic Proportion
Algebraic proportion will be extremely procedural. So long as college students learn the query rigorously, as soon as they know methods to do it, it is virtually a assured 5 marks. So I included a non-calculator proportion query that was a bit totally different to questions they’d seen earlier than. What I appreciated about this was the accessibility: nobody from my class bought all of the marks, however they did handle to select up one or two.
Proper-Angled Trigonometry
This query was my pièce de résistance. I figured that if our tremendous intelligent Yr 9s breezed via all the opposite difficult questions I threw at them, they’d certainly need to 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 Yr 10. This query will be achieved with right-angled trigonometry. The way in which 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 Yr 9s managed to unravel it in the best way I envisaged. However one very sensible pupil 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 submit will go on ceaselessly! Like I stated in my final submit, there are quite a few locations we will discover good evaluation questions for Key Stage 3. It is a disgrace they are not centrally produced anymore – the outdated KS3 SATs contained nice questions, however no less than we will nonetheless draw on these to make our personal assessments.
When you have any good Yr 9 evaluation questions you’d wish to share, please tweet me.
Thanks for studying!
