We have a brand new feature at Diagnostic Questions that I am very excited to tell you about. It goes by the name of GCSE Revision Streams, and they work like this.

Each of your students that are signed up to the GCSE Revision Stream is automatically set two lovely maths questions a day, every single day until their GCSE Maths exam. These questions have been carefully chosen to cover all the main content from either the GCSE Higher or GCSE Foundation Maths exam.

Students can answer these two questions on their phones, tablet, laptops, whatever they prefer. The questions appear at 6am each day, and your students have until 11pm to get their answers in. Some of my Year 11s choose to answer over breakfast, some on the bus, and others just before they go to sleep.

How Revision Streams benefit Students

The key to succeeding in maths (in my opinion) is continual practice, and the Revision Streams help facilitate this. Two high-quality questions, each and every day, covering the main content they will need for their GCSE maths exam. Short, sharp, top-quality, focussed revision. This is far better than doing a load of last minute cramming.

When students complete their two questions, they are told whether they are right or wrong, and then the real learning starts!

Say one of the questions was on Ratio:

A student might give their answer and explanation as follows:

They are told they are wrong, but what good is that if they don’t know why they are wrong or how to get it right? Sure, they could ask Mum or Dad, or phone a friend, but what if they don’t know? Or what if the student isn’t confident enough to do that? And of course they can ask their teacher, but the teacher is not there at that precise moment, and even if they were they may bot be able to explain it in a way that the student understands.

Well, never fear, because when the student reviews their answers, they are automatically shown explanations given by students who got it right:

And they can keep generating these explanations until they find the one that makes sense to them. Real explanations, given by real students all around the world, written in a way that might just make all the difference.

How Revision Streams benefit Teachers

We couldn’t let students have all the fun, so we wanted to do something extra special with the Revision Streams to benefit teachers. So, at the end of each day, after the Stream closes down for the night, the class teacher is emailed a personalised document containing the following:

1) A clear summary of their class’ performance
2) A meaningful illustration of their class’ performance relative to the rest of their school and the rest of the country
3) The 3 most popular correct explanations from the correct answer, which may offer a new way of explaining a concept to their students
4) The most popular explanations given for the wrong answers, allowing teachers to identify and understand key misconceptions their students may have
5) The answers and explanations each of their students gave

Below are some screen shots of what this report looks like:

I hope this will prove an invaluable document in learning about your students’ understanding of mathematics. It can show you at a glance who has real depth of understanding in a given concept, allowing you to pair students up, or direct your teaching accordingly. It can tell you what topics your class as a whole struggle with, and direct you to teachers in your school who may be able to help. And I am also convinced that the continual daily practise, coupled with the access to unlimited explanations, will be of enormous benefit to your students.

And if you want to download an example pdf, just click here

You can try out a 7 day Higher or Foundation Stream for free with as many students as you like. Just click here for more details.

And until Friday 27th March, you can purchase the full Stream – that is currently 74 days worth of top-quality carefully chosen GCSE Maths questions taking you right up until the GCSE Maths exam – for the bargain price of 50p per student (usual price is £1). That is comfortably less than 1p per day. Again, just click here to find out more.

I really hope you and your students find this useful!