Each week I put together a 10 question maths Diagnostic Quiz for my lovely higher tier Year 11 GCSE Maths class. They get set it on a Monday, and it is due in Thursday morning. They answer it on their phones, tablets and laptops, or in the school library at lunchtime. Anyone can do this, and it is completely free.

Then, on Thursday evening, over a nice cup of tea (and often a yoghurt), I look over their results.

Here is a snap-shot from Mr Barton’s Year 11 – Quiz 4:

I can see straight away that Questions 3 and 5 were causing problems. If I scroll down the screen, I can see what these questions were, and I see that Question 3 involved an area scale factor:

Have a go at the question yourself, if you like 🙂

Hovering over each of the dots shows me which student gave that answer and a quick look at the explanation they wrote:

Clicking on the question itself and filtering by my class, allows me to see all my student’s answers and explanations:

So, I can clearly see that the misconception lies in muddling up area scale factor with length scale factor. So, I know I need to address this in lesson.

But the best news is that my students are already on the way to resolving their own misconceptions, because when they complete the quiz and review their answers, they can view explanations from students from all around the world who have got the question correct until they find one that makes sense to them:

I encourage my students to copy out particularly nice explanations into their exercise books to further aid their GCSE Maths revision:

I know I am biased (as it is my website!), but I genuinely believe that I have never known more about my students’ understanding of topics than I have since I have been setting these weekly quizzes. I get a quick overview of the class’ performance, and then I can drill down into any question, analyse students’ explanations, to get a real depth of understanding about where their difficulties and gaps lie. And then I can make use of the explanations they give in class and to inform my future teaching.

I plan to write one of these quizzes a week for my Higher Tier GCSE  class. They are available on this page, and the first 5 are below. I also do the same for my Year 8 class.

For guides on how to add classes, assign quizzes and build your own (it’s all free!), and more, just view this page.