Secondary Teaching and Learning Adviser, Chris Pearce, has a few ideas for teaching Assessment Objectives 2 and 3 (TIP: Want more articles like this?
Sign up for Collins Maths Emails to get free maths teaching resources.) At last the mathematics GCSE specifications for first teaching from 2010 have been approved. For many teachers, the first thing to look at is the new sample papers. How different do they look? What does assessment of the new assessment objectives look like in practice? In case you need reminding, Assessment Objective 1 (AO1) is “recall and use knowledge” and we are familiar with that idea. That gets half the marks. But what about AO2 (select and apply mathematical methods) and AO3 (interpret and analyse problems) which make up the other 50% of the marks? Some teachers I have spoken to have been worried about the questions focussing on AO2 and AO3 because they are different to the type of question we are used to. Consider one example, which gave the candidates several charts and asked them to make and justify a decision based on them. One teacher’s initial reaction was “my pupils couldn’t do that; they would not kno
