With under 50 days to go to the Maths GCSE (my hands are trembling writing that number!), I just wanted to share a few, exciting things we have put together at Diagnostic Questions that I am using with my students in my school, and which will hopefully be of benefit to you and your students. And best of all, each one of these is completely free 🙂

Please note: if you are having difficulty uploading your students to Diagnostic Questions, just drop us an email containing a spreadsheet of your students’ names and class codes, and we will happily do it for you.

 

1. GCSE Revision Page
Helping students focus on the skills and topics that they need help on most, enabling them to revise independently

When students log on, there is a new button on their dashboard called Revise Now.

Clicking on this takes students to a page where they are presented with the topics they have struggled most on, arranged in priority order

They then have 3 options:
1. Revise Now – this takes them to a top-quality video on that specific topic
2. Related Quiz – this allows them to try a quiz on this topic to test their understanding, and benefit from reading correct explanations given by students from all around the world until they find one that makes sense to them
3. Need More Help – this gives students the option of 1 hour free on-line tuition with Maths Doctor, the award-winning tuition arm of our company

I am advising my Year 11s to try to box-off one topic per day from this list!

 

2. Diagnostic Question Full Higher GCSE Papers
A change to doing paper-based mock exams, which will also save you time and give you extra insight.

These are Diagnostic Questions versions of full GCSE exam papers. Not only will the system mark your students’ efforts and organise the data for you, but the insights you gain will be far more useful than your usual Question Level Analysis. A QLA may tell you that a student cannot do something, like solve a pair of simultaneous equations. But that isn’t very good when there are several key, and very different skills invovled in solving simultaneous equations. By breaking down questions into specific skill areas and identifying key misconceptions, the DQ GCSE Maths Quiz will tell you exactly where in the process they go wrong, allowing you to offer targeted, effective help to your students.

These free GCSE papers are based on the Edexcel specification, although they are suitable for using with all examining bodies. Thanks to the work of Trish Higgins (and myself!), we have the following papers covered:
June 2014
November 2014
June 2015 (will be live in the next couple of weeks)
November 2015

To access these papers to assign them to your students, simply visit this link

 

3. Free Daily GCSE Maths Revision
Two questions a day, every day, delivered straight to your students

The free Daily GCSE Maths Revision stream has been running since the start of the 100 day countdown to the first GCSE Maths exam, and has over 10,000 students from around the UK taking part. Each day students log on, they are presented with either two Higher or two Foundation key GCSE Maths questions to answer, and each evening you are sent a detailed pdf report highlighting any key misconceptions your class have.

With less than 50 days to go to the Maths GCSE, it is still not too late to get involved. Simply visit this link to sign up your students for free.

 

4. GCSE Maths Takeaway
An all-in-one page for independent revision

The GCSE Maths Takeaway page is the most popular page on my website. It contains 111 key GCSE Maths topics, each one accompanied by GCSE practise questions, hand-written solutions, a top-quality video, a bespoke Diagnostic Questions quiz, and an online interactive quiz with an infinite number of questions!

You can get straight to the page via this link

 

5. GCSE Maths Essential Skill Quizzes
Cover all those essential skills each week

I was getting fed up with my students, many of whom are aiming for As and Bs, dropping daft marks on early questions in the paper. In an attempt to remedy this, I built them a series of quizzes that focus exclusively on these essential skills.

At this stage of the year, I simply do not have time to cover each of these topics in great depth in lessons, so I use the results of these quizzes to identify any glaring issues, allowing me to focus only on the most important areas.

You can view all these quizzes and assign them to your students via this link.

 

I really hope you and your students find these resources useful, and happy revising!

Craig Barton