An Update on GCSE Maths Resources from AQA

Last week saw the release of the final report of the Commission on Assessment without Levels.

Yesterday we released a significant new resource which all teachers should find interesting. Our view is that these KS3 tests match many of the principles set out in this high profile report…

Key Stage 3 Tests

What are AQA Key Stage 3 tests?

Covering Years 7, 8 and 9, our termly Key Stage 3 tests help you check your students’ understanding and identify areas where intervention is needed.

They’re formatted to look like GCSE papers, using similar command words and question styles, to get Key Stage 3 students familiar with the language and layout of high stakes exams.

We’ve designed the tests as flexible, formative, assessments you can tailor and customise to suit your needs.

How to use the tests

Start your students with the main test for that term. From there, you can challenge students who perform well further with a more demanding extension test.

For students who don’t perform as well, follow on with the consolidation test to understand more about gaps in their knowledge.

The end of year tests cover all the year’s content, and are available as main or extension papers. These tests more closely mirror the structure of GCSE, with one calculator and one non-calculator paper each, and overlapping questions. We’d expect students to do either the main or the extension test as a summative assessment at the end of the year.

Our Key Stage 3 tests are designed to help you see how your students are engaging with mathematics and performing relative to each other. We don’t think they should be used to predict future GCSE grades and we won’t offer any indicative grade boundaries - currently they couldn't be reliable. However, these tests, or questions taken from them, may support your school’s strategy in addressing assessment without levels.

How the content of the tests is structured

We developed the tests with the support of teachers from the ARK schools, and the topics in each test are closely aligned to the Mathematics Mastery 5 year secondary plan.

If you don’t teach Key Stage 3 in this way, you can cut/paste questions from different tests to create something that matches what you’ve taught.

Blogs

  1. Summary of this summer’s award:
  2. If you're interested in how the new grading will work for GCSE Maths, our Qualifications Manager Ben Stafford has written a new blog post on the dangers of linking topics to grades, and grade boundaries for the new GCSE:

Diagnostic Questions

We’re doing some collaborative work with Craig Barton (TES Maths Adviser & owner of mrbartonmaths.com) on some diagnostic questions. These are proving to be incredibly popular, and you can read more about them here:

Exemplar Student Responses & New Practice Papers

Exemplar student responses of Year 11 performance on new GCSE style questions, following our trial in April, and the new set of practice papers are now available…