Oxford University Press and Diagnostic Questions have teamed up to provide some free materials to help you support your Year 7 students in this most difficult of starts to the year.
There are three types of materials available:
Below is some more information about each of these materials, along with some suggestions about how you might use them. You can request access to the free supporting resources via the link at the bottom of this page.
I have built a series of quizzes on key areas that students will have encountered at primary school and which form the foundation of much of the mathematics they will encounter over the coming months and years.
You can access the quizzes here:
Each quiz comprises diagnostic questions designed in such a way that a student’s choice of wrong answer gives you a good idea of the specific nature of their misunderstanding.
How can these be used?
If your students have access to devices, you can assign each quiz to your class via the Diagnostic Questions platform. You will benefit from automated marking, and actionable insights into individual student’s understanding as well as the view of your whole class.
Alternatively you can project each question up on the board. Students can vote for their choice of answers with their fingers or A, B, C, D cards. You can then instigate a discussion along the lines of “Emma, you think the answer is A, tell us why”, “Mo, you think the answer is B, convince us” etc., before explaining the answer yourself. Using the questions in this manner is an ideal way to get your students discussing mathematics, as well as providing an unrivalled insight into their understanding of key concepts.
Each quiz has an accompanying document which provides:
You can access the supporting content here.*
How can these be used?
Whether you choose to assign the quizzes online or use them in class, you could identify, say, the three worst answered questions. You could then use the supporting OUP resources to give students further practice on the concepts behind each of these troublesome questions.
As with the Diagnostic Questions, these can either be accessed by students on their devices, or projected up on the board for whole class practice.
Once students have worked through the materials, you could assess their understanding by choosing the relevant questions from the follow-up quizzes, which are available here:
OUP have provided access to a paper-based baseline assessment called the Oxford National Curriculum Tests (ONCT). These tests are designed for Year 6 end of Key Stage assessment, but provide an opportunity to quickly identify knowledge gaps in new Year 7 students in this unusual year. These provide teachers with an independent measure of pupil attainment that can feed into teachers’ professional judgements about pupil progress in maths.
How can this be used?
The ONCT tests can be used as a traditional baseline assessment, and the associated reporting tools will provide a class overview, as well as the means score for the class. This overview will allow you to quickly see which pupils are performing above/below the class average.
You will also be able to see an in-depth analysis of individual students’ performance on a question-by-question basis. This will help you to identify specific strengths and weaknesses. When viewed in conjunction with the information gathered from the Diagnostic Questions quizzes, it will enable you to gain a better understanding of any areas of specific difficulty for individual students. This may help inform your future teaching plans and identify needs for further intervention.
Links to these assessment papers (along with a supporting Teacher Guide paper) will be sent to you when you submit the request form below.
Used together, I believe these three types of material will provide a fun, engaging and insightful way to get a sense of your students’ understandings of key concepts, and give you concrete actions to take if any gaps emerge.
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*Request the supporting data insights, intervention resources and baseline tests via the link above. You’ll then receive an automatic email with links to the resource material.
As part of this project, OUP and Eedi will ask you to contribute your feedback on the effectiveness of this resource pack.
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