Speed Exam Questions

You will have to excuse my poorly constructed example question, but I’ve noticed a lot of speed, distance, time questions of this nature:

“Sophie travels 90 miles from Manchester to Birmingham. Altogether the journey takes her 1 hour 40 minutes.

Aside from 20 miles of roadworks on the route, her average speed was 70mph.

What was her average speed through the roadworks?”

Initially my current year 11s wouldn’t attempt a question like this, too many different numbers and not the expected (more straight forward) “a train travels 120km in 4 hours, calculate the speed”.

In one question I saw a diagram which helped break the question down, and now I encourage all my classes to draw a simple diagram to model the problem:

It is basically a straight line split up into different ‘legs’ of the journey (in this case two different parts of the journey roadworks and no roadworks) and then write out “s=“ “d=“ and “t=“ for each leg of the journey.

They fill out the bits they know and then it is clear the bits they need to find out. In my example, the distance with no roadworks can be found by total distance subtract 20 miles of roadworks, then the time can be found using speed and distance:

Then they can find time taken through roadworks to find the average speed:

I find this can be applied to most speed, distance, time questions and as soon as my students get a more complex question like this adding the structure highlights what needs to be calculated in a student friendly way.

Any other suggestions on how to tackle some of the heavier, more complex exam questions the students are now facing?

“I Don’t Know How To Revise!”

“I Don’t Know How to Revise!”

With GCSE’s looming (19 lessons left before paper one!) Easter is the perfect time for students to get some serious revision done. Regularly I hear students comment “I don’t know how to revise” or worse “I don’t revise!” and simply suggesting and showing them some ideas and giving them freedom often results in no revision being done whatsoever. When you are asking a student to “go and revise” it is a massively daunting task and often students don’t know where to start!

So this Easter (as well as three papers!) I’ve handed out a revision checklist. It’s very simple to create and they are not exactly ground breaking, but the impact of using them should never be underestimated.

I selected topics I knew my students needed to work on and inserted them in the first column of an excel spreadsheet. This in itself is powerful, cutting down the mass of topics to a smaller, more manageable and focused chunk. You can even make personal lists for individual students or for groups of students with different targets.

Then along the rows I suggested different tasks they could do to revise each topic, for example our school subscribes to several online resources so each resource had tasks within it on their own row.

The students can then check off topics they have looked at by completing the different tasks. As there are several suggestions of tasks for each topic they can even interleave their revision and make sure they come back to topics again using a different resource.

It is one of the simplest and quickest resources I have created as a teacher, yet it powerfully enables students to focus their precious time on to the type of revision you want them to be doing. As they tick off various tasks it will help them feel productive and build positive and productive revision habits.

I have even given my year 9s the list in a hope that they have more time to improve their revision habits so when they reach year 11 it won’t feel like such a daunting task!

Let me know if you have any tips for Maths revision strategies for students!