What misconceptions do students have when it comes to understanding and interpreting algebraic expressions? Essential Quiz 9 is officially the best answered GCSE Essential Skills Quiz in history! There was a success rate of 73%Continue reading
Category: Diagnostic Questions
Tree Diagrams (independent events) – GCSE Maths Insight of the Week 8
What misconceptions do students have with tree diagrams involving independent events and decimals? Essential Skills Quiz 8 has once again revealed some fundamental misconceptions our Year 11 students have with key areas of mathematics. Topics thatContinue reading
Writing Algebraic Expressions – GCSE Maths Insight of the Week 7
What mistakes do students make when representing a situation as an algebraic expression? Essential Skills Quiz 7 has revealed some important and fascinating misconceptions held by both the Year 11s of Thornleigh Saleisan College, Bolton, andContinue reading
Two Way Tables – GCSE Maths Insight of the Week 6
What mistakes do students make when filling in data and interpreting information from a two way table? It may be the half term holidays, but the Insight of the Week rolls on! Hundreds of schools andContinue reading
Mean from a list of data – GCSE Maths Insight of the Week 5
What misconceptions do GCSE students have when it comes to more challenging questions about the mean of a set of numbers? Each week we set all our Year 11 Higher GCSE students a GCSE EssentialContinue reading
Drawing Cumulative Frequency Diagrams – GCSE Maths Insight of the Week 4
“What misconceptions do GCSE Maths students have when it comes to plotting cumulative frequency diagrams from grouped data?” The number of students around the country taking these weekly quizzes is growing and growing, and asContinue reading
Squaring Negative Numbers – GCSE Maths Insight of the Week 3
“What misconceptions do GCSE students have when squaring negative numbers in the context of a table of values for a quadratic graph?” The number of students around the country taking these weekly quizzes is growingContinue reading
Expanding Double Brackets – GCSE Maths Insight of the Week 2
Each week we set all our Year 11 Higher GCSE students a GCSE Essential Skills Quiz from my Diagnostic Questions website. These quizzes are completely free and are designed to test the content that appearsContinue reading
Simplifying Expressions – GCSE Maths Insight of the Week 1
Each week we set all our Year 11 Higher GCSE students a GCSE Essential Skills Quiz from my Diagnostic Questions website. These quizzes are completely free and are designed to test the content that appearsContinue reading
@TESMaths Resource of the Day: 17th to 30th August 2015
Each day I select one of my favourite free maths resources that have been uploaded and shared by the generous and incredibly talented users of the TES Maths website and tweet it out via @TESmaths. I call thisContinue reading
Year 7 Baseline Maths Tests – Assessing without levels
Recently, I have been doing a lot of thinking about assessment – as you can imagine, my wife has been delighted. In my series of blog posts about writing our new maths scheme of work, IContinue reading
Adding new classes and students to Diagnostic Questions
It is that time of year again! Students have moved classes and new students have joined your school. Here is your simple guide to making all the necessary changes to your Diagnostic Questions set-up. AndContinue reading
My new AfL with Diagnostic Questions workshop
From September 2015, on Wednesday afternoons and all day Thursday, I will be available to deliver a brand-new, Assessment for Learning with Diagnostic Questions workshop in your school. This will be a high-quality (I promise!)Continue reading
Diagnostic Question Badges and Reputation Points
Over at Diagnostic Questions, we have introduced a new feature, whereby students and teachers (because I know you wouldn’t want to be left out!), can earn badges and reputation points based on their levels ofContinue reading
Diagnostic Questions: exciting news
It gives me great pleasure to unveil a sneak preview of three brand-new, exciting features that are coming to Diagnostic Questions in the new academic year. As we have said from the outset, we wantContinue reading
The 5 most interesting misconceptions in mathematics – my Edexcel Maths Conference Talk, July 2015
On Saturday 4th July, I was kindly invited to give the opening address at the wonderful Edexcel Maths Conference in Warwick. The title of my talk was “The 5 most interesting misconceptions in mathematics”. QuiteContinue reading
Focusing GCSE Maths Revision
With just 2 weeks to go until Paper 1 of the Edexcel and AQA GCSE Maths Exam, I just wanted to share with you something I am doing with my lovely Year 11 class toContinue reading
500,000 answers!
We have recently hit a significant milestone at Diagnostic Questions… half a million answers! These have come from students from all over the world. And what was the 500,000th answer, I hear you ask? Well,Continue reading
GCSE Maths Premium Quizzes
As you may know, I have created two free GCSE quizzes based on the Edexcel June 2014 Higher Tier maths papers. The idea was that these would test the same skills as the original paper copies,Continue reading
GCSE Fractions Quiz
I created this 10 questions quiz on Fractions for my Year 11 class testing all the key skills they will need for their forthcoming GCSEs, including simplifying fractions, mixed to improper fractions, the four operationsContinue reading