To see all of the work I do for TES Maths, including Resource of the Week, Inspect the Spec, Pedagogy Place, Maths Newsletters and Topic Collections, please visit the TES Maths Blog here

What is it?
I have long been a fan of David Taylor’s Increasingly Difficult Questions (IDQ) website, so I was absolutely delighted to see he had uploaded his wonderful resources to TES to share them with a wider audience. So, to celebrate, the least I could do was to choose one of them for Resource of the Week! The concept behind IDQs is so simple and yet so powerful. Students are presented with a series of questions on a given topic, but they get progressively more difficult. More than that though, as we can see in this example on the mean, they incorporate a wide range of other topics, allowing students to benefit from the positive effects of interleaving, whilst also starting to see maths as they connected subject that it is.

How can it be used?
Increasingly Difficult Questions are ideal to use at the end of a topic unit. So, you have taught the basics of finding the mean from a list of data, and now you present your students with the selection of questions in this resource. As they work their way through the sheet, students are confronted with the challenge of applying their skills at calculating the mean when negatives, decimals and finally algebraic expressions are involved. The selection and progression through the questions is excellent, and the answers are even included too! Brilliant stuff!

Thanks so much for sharing
Craig Barton

Download: Increasingly Difficult Questions – Mean Average
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