September 2022

Increased content now live

We are delighted to announce that we have now completed two full pages of practice paper content at both tiers. With 84 tests, we have the most complete library of Pearson 9-1 GCSE practice papers at your disposal all of which come with our unique approach to interactive support designed to help pupils develop stronger problem solving and procedural techniques.

Topic Test Integration

Our new topic menu has been very well received and schools are telling us that they are also using it as a homework tool in KS3. Individual topic tests are now fully integrated so that pupils can easily find lots more practice of a specific skill when working through a test paper. Where topics have been unlocked by teachers, students will see a topic button at the base of any exam question they are working on. This means they can instantly switch to extended practice of a particular key skill and ‘return to test’ mode when they are ready.

Advanced Information Revision Support Nov 2022

Similar to our support for the Summer 22 exams, we have identified how our new topic tests align with Pearson’s Advanced Information guidance which outlines the content for each test paper in November 22.   At the top of the bulk setting menu, you can select either paper 1, 2 or 3 and it will automatically tick the relevant topics for you. This means that you can unlock content relevant to each test paper so that your resit students can prioritise their efforts between each exam. Please note the usual caveats hold and we cannot guarantee that anything omitted will not be tested.

Methodmaths Booster Days: We are recruiting

Are you interested in earning additional income this academic year? Due to the rapid expansion of our very popular revision day model, we are still on the lookout for talented Maths teachers who can help deliver our programmes in schools. Pay is up to £400 per day depending on level of responsibility and we are looking for availability during term time, weekends, holidays or even after school for virtual sessions. All resources for delivery are provided by our central team including photocopying and access to our website during the events.

Requirements:

• Qualified Maths Teacher with brilliant subject knowledge and ability to inspire.

• Great track record in delivering excellent exam results.

• Strong ICT skills.

• Ability to build positive relationships quickly with new pupils and school leadership teams.

• Willingness to travel and work as part of a small teaching team in a classroom setting.

If you are interested in finding out more about our booster day service as a school you can find out here. If you are interested in working for us as a tutor, please complete the form below and a member of our recruitment team will be in touch to have a chat and answer any of the questions you might have.

March 2022

GCSE Topic Menu Now Live

Since our last update we have further improved the functionality of methodmaths and continue to address the needs of schools in preparation for the Summer 2022 exams. With 66 tests, we have the most complete library of Pearson 9-1 GCSE practice papers at your disposal all of which come with interactive support to help pupils develop stronger problem solving and procedural techniques.

Our new topic menu has been released to all member schools. You can access it by switching the filter from test to topic mode on the dashboard. Here you will find all Pearson 9-1 exam questions grouped into approx. 150 topic tests. Questions have been placed into a rough order of difficulty and colour coding will reflect how early or late questions have appeared in a real test. These are great if you want your students to develop a broader understanding of the full range of questions that could be asked within a topic. Some questions contain several skills so these may appear more than once in different topic sets.

Each topic test will only be visible to students once it has been unlocked by a teacher or admin user. This can be done quickly using the bulk tool facility.  Unlock and feedback options within topic mode can be controlled independently of test mode and students can now move smoothly between questions of the same type. If a question is completed in topic mode it will automatically be marked within the original test and visa-versa. We hope this will be great for supporting homework particularly in year 10 and earlier.

Advanced Information Revision Support 2022

For your convenience, we have identified how our new topic tests align with Pearson’s Advanced Information guidance which outlines the content for each test paper this summer.   At the top of the bulk setting menu, you can select either paper 1, 2 or 3 and it will automatically tick the relevant topics for you. This means that you can unlock content relevant to each test paper so that year 11 students can prioritise their efforts between each exam. Please note the usual caveats hold and we cannot guarantee that anything omitted will not be tested.

Methodmaths Booster Days

Our revision booster days across the country are continuing to be well received by both students and teachers. We are currently supporting over 3000 students mostly through the school led tuition programme and you can read more about it here. If you would like to find out more about how our brilliant teams of teachers can support your pupils this year and next, please do get in contact with us on tuition@methodmaths.com  As our support in schools grows, we are also on the lookout for talented Maths teachers who might be interested in very well paid holiday work.

Online Mock exams

We have now established a very accurate solution to online GCSE maths mock exams following successful trials with schools in Bermuda. Sophisticated auto-marking combined with the expertise of human markers has enabled us to create an assessment that is identical to a real GCSE paper in content but still allows for human intervention when more complex interpretation is needed. You can read more about it here. We are also delighted to announce that we have teamed up with OCR to deliver a mock service using this exact model.

November 2021

Methodmaths Booster Days

We are delighted to announce a number of new services that Methodmaths can now offer to our member schools. The first of these are GCSE revision days.

Throughout the previous academic year, we ran over 100 face to face booster days in schools across the country. We built a team of brilliant Maths teachers all of whom have been ASTs, SLEs or HODs with outstanding track records and coupled them with a programme of support that utilised both our GCSE topic booklets and website. The combination was very powerful. Not only were we able to provide bespoke face to face support based on the needs of each school, but we were also able to use Methodmaths at the end of each day to consolidate and check understanding of the topics covered. The feedback from pupils, teachers and headteachers was excellent and there was always a tangible outcome. Schools signed up to either 3 or 5 days spread across the year, and we made it our mission to help pupils master up to an additional 20 topics.

If you are interested in adding additional capacity to your Maths department and want to tap into our expert team of teachers to support with intervention, please get in contact via tuition@methodmaths.com There is a significant amount of government funding available to schools which can be used to subsidise up to 75% of our booster days and you can find more information about this on our School Led Tuition page here.

Topic Menu

Now that we have hundreds of real exam questions in our database, we felt it was time to start producing a topic dashboard so that it was easier for pupils to consolidate a particular skill rather than tackling a whole test. Whilst this was always possible using the topic filters, it will be easier to manage in terms of unlocking questions for homework purposes. Once we have collated the questions, we intend to put them into difficulty order using results plus performance data and our teaching judgement. There will be around 150 topics to choose from across both tiers. You can already see that some topics are more frequent than others and this should help teachers and pupils gauge which areas to prioritise nearer exam time.

There is only ever one version of any question in Methodmaths. This means if a question is completed in test paper mode, it will also appear completed in the topic menu. Equally, if students complete a topic, they can see how those marks are contributing to their overall grades when they return to the test paper dashboard.

We are hopeful that this will be ready for launch in early 2022.

September 2021

Class and pupil manager

Following feedback from lots of our customers we have now added a class manager to your accounts to help with rolling classes over into the new year. Whilst the csv upload is still required when you are adding new accounts in bulk, there is now a way to add single users, change passwords and change classes without the need for spreadsheets. To access the class manager area, follow the pupil icon which is only available to admin account holders.

As always, we have tried to keep the layout as simple and as intuitive as possible. When you first enter the class manager it will naturally load the first class in your account. 

To edit or delete an individual account click on the two buttons next to a users name. 

To add a new pupil into the system, click on the +1 button. You will need to indicate whether this is a pupil, teacher or admin account. 

To access the normal csv upload you will also see this next to the +1 button. 

To perform bulk actions on a class you will see a pencil and a cross at the top of the page. Simply select the class you want from the dropdown and then click on the pencil to make whole group changes. This is ideal for rolling over students into their new classes without losing any of their previous work. 

To return to your question dashboard you can exit the class manager by clicking on the cross. 

We hope this makes the management of students in methodmaths a little easier. It is still a work in progress so any feedback or further improvement ideas would be gratefully received. 

July 2021

Pearson Mock Set 6 Papers now Live (Test labels 3124.. / 4124..)

We are pleased to let you know that we have added another set of GCSE papers to our member accounts increasing the overall test bank to 66 GCSE 9 -1 papers. Please do not forget that the Nov 2020 papers are available, but we have kept them hidden as they are the most recent set of tests. Just let us know when you need access and we will activate them for your school. 

Data saving 

As part of our optimisation work to improve the speed of our website, all question data is now being saved at question level. This includes any annotations as well as interactions with input boxes. It means teachers and students can now see changes made to a question, by the other user, by simply moving between questions. Please note that the saving process is triggered when you do this or return to the dashboard. Students never have to sign out to protect their work. 

Test mode updates 

Many of our schools have been using methodmaths to deliver real mock exams this year and it has proved to be highly effective in conjunction with teacher moderation. Following feedback, we have 

Where a student has achieved partial credit on a question you will notice only half of the question box will be coloured. 

When a teacher makes an adjustment using the mark pad, a black outline will appear around it. This is also reflected on the question button indicating to teachers and students that a manual alteration has been made. 

You can now easily mark the same question for all students. Switch to class mode and use the up and down arrows next to the students’ name. 

Planned updates over the summer period. 

• Class manager to support class changes without the need for csv uploads. 

• Completion of all Pearson 9-1 content. This will bring our question banks up to 84 GCSE 9 – 1 Test Papers. 

• Separate topic tests to support ongoing homework throughout KS4 (and earlier) 

• More short, animated tutorials to support each question. 

• Additional pdf workbooks on some of the missing topic types. 

March 2021

November 2020 Papers now Live

We are delighted to announce that we have now added another set of GCSE papers (November 2020) to all of our member accounts increasing the overall test quantity to 60. As many of you will be using these papers to help determine teacher assessed grades, we will only release these once you have contacted us. Even though the tests are locked by default, we understand the sensitive nature of these assessments and do not want students to gain early access without your full permission. 

Improvements to Feedback and Annotation tool. 

We have ironed out a few bugs in the way student and teacher data was saving so you can be sure that all annotations will be kept on each question. We have also decided to separate teacher feedback from student annotations so that neither user can delete or change the other user’s notes. 

This feature has been a huge hit during the lockdown period, and our members are realising that our online mocks can in fact be delivered very accurately and efficiently when teachers supplement our auto marking with human judgement. 

New Login Screen 

We hope you like our new login screen. It is much easier on the eye and if you are bored, the squares will light up if you hover over them. If that wasn’t exciting enough, we have written a more comprehensive introduction animation which we would encourage all teachers and students to click through. This contains some general advice around navigating the website, important shortcut keys and tutorials on how to use the various drawing and construction tools. You will also find a link to our latest news which will bring you back to this newsletter (and previous editions). Finally, we will be developing our social media presence over the coming months so please follow us if you enjoy our service. 

Improved Filters 

You will now notice that you can isolate crossover content from either tier to help teachers and students focus on this important section of questions. We envisage that this will be extremely useful next year when making decisions about tiers of entry. As a reminder, students will only need to complete these questions once at either tier and work will be automatically transferred to the other tier. 

The other major filter improvement relates to the addition of difficulty levels. We have categorised every question from the live series test papers into deciles using Results Plus performance data. This means that you can now isolate the easiest questions (0-10%) up to the hardest (90-100%). This could help if you are planning to take a criteria based approach to grading. 

February 2021

User guides 

We have written both Teacher and Student guides to help users navigate the new website. We have never done this before as we believed the simple architecture of Methodmaths made it very intuitive, but as it has become more sophisticated, we wanted to ensure that our members fully understood its capacity. These are now available in the google drive resource area. 

More papers added! 

We are delighted to announce that we have now added another set of GCSE papers to all of our member accounts increasing the quantity to 48. You will notice a scroll arrow at the bottom of the dashboard to take you to page 2. We will be adding another test series before the end of the month and we have already made a start on the November 2020 scripts which should be ready in March. 

The most accurate system for generating CAG data 

In January, we introduced our new analytics tool that collects the GCSE grades that students achieve whilst practising on Methodmaths. The feedback has been hugely positive, and we believe our website offers the most accurate online solution for 2 reasons: 

1 We only ever use real official tests. We never modify them or change the numbers as we know the exam boards apply a complex process to the production of every paper. 

2 We do not shy away from the more complex questions. Whether it requires a box plot, written communication or a proof, we always provide the facility for students to tackle them in line with mark schemes. 

Every test question is designed with careful mathematical thinking but also with the end user experience in mind. We do not believe in set templates which other websites use to generate thousands of questions that look the same. To celebrate this, we wanted to share some of our favourite question from the latest papers we have added. 

Where working out is required as part of a proof, it will only reveal one step at a time. Otherwise, scaffolding is only enabled at teacher discretion. 

January 2021

Real Time Analytics 

Happy New Year to our Methodmaths Community. We hope you are safe and well in these challenging times. Following the recent news that GCSE exams have been cancelled for 2021, it is likely that we will be returning to Teacher Assessed grades. It is also likely that teachers will need to build an evidence base for each of their pupils. Methodmaths is perfect for this. Not only can you conduct real practice exams on our website, you can also generate accurate summative grades for each test. 

Over the Christmas period, the Methodmaths team have been busy building a summative analytics tool that easily extracts both engagement data, raw mark progress over different time periods and a set of grades for all test papers completed. This is live and will update in real time. To access the reports which can be downloaded as either pdfs or excel files, you will now notice a new button on your teacher dashboard. 

Test Titles 

You may have noticed that we have changed all of the test titles at the start of the year. We appreciate that this may cause some initial inconvenience but the new numbering system is the outcome of consistent feedback from schools that they wanted the test series 'cloaked' to make it slightly more difficult for students to look up the solutions on you tube. We have left it to the last minute so that pupils could still complete any homework you may have set over the holidays. Each test has a unique number so it should make it easier to direct pupils to a specific test going forward. 

There is a mapping document for staff in the GDrive resource folder. 

More tests will be arriving very soon on your dashboard which you will be able to access by scrolling down the menu. 

December 2020

Firstly, can we say a big thank you to our member schools who have been in contact with such positive feedback about the new version of Methodmaths. It really does help us soldier on with the conversion of the remaining test content and we are proud of how our website is shaping up. Please remember that our old system will be shutting down at the end of December 2020. 

This is just a reminder that Teacher and Admin accounts can access our offline content by following the G drive link on the dashboard. This contains: 

66 Y6/Y7 Topic Workbooks with model answers. 

Infinite Arithmetic Google Sheet. Create an infinite supply of worksheets that mirror the KS2 arithmetic tests. 

92 GCSE Topic Workbooks with model answers. We have added hyperlinks to the index page and QR codes for ease of access on phones. This content uses IGCSE papers and is less familiar to students. 

150 GCSE Self Marking Topic Workbooks. Still useful if students need to work offline and have access to Excel. 

Question Level Analysis. We believe we have the most sophisticated QLA system available. This is because our QLAs are an intrinsic feature of the dashboard and link every question to a student’s original response. Teachers and Admin users can interrogate any question by either entering a student’s dashboard or switching to class view and exploring a common issue for a specific question. This is much more useful than a list of 0s,1s and 2s or a disconnected red/amber/green spreadsheet. To help you with navigation we have updated the header to remind you where you are and the student you are viewing. 

These percentages give you the average score on each question and are a quick way to judge how well either a class or entire cohort have performed. 

You might now have spotted a camera tool at the top of the dashboard. This allows you to take a snapshot in time of either a student’s entire record or a single test for an entire class or cohort. This is useful for tracking progress over time and keeping paper records (some of us still do!). Navigate to the page you are interested in and take a picture. It will create a tidy pdf document with the information you require for printing or saving elsewhere. 

Coming soon!! 

We will be releasing another set of Mock papers in the coming weeks once we have completed final testing. We will also be adding shortcut key information to the bottom of every question following feedback from our members. We have started work on a general analytics tool that will let you know about login counts, last login, marks accumulated over different time periods and grades achieved across multiple papers. 

October 2020

Great news. We have completed our first page of test papers for GCSE Foundation and Higher. This brings us up to 42 practice papers that now operate perfectly on desktops, laptops, ipads, chromebooks and tablets. We are now working through the remaining mock papers and have already started designing the November 2020 tests which will be added in January. Remember flash will no longer work beyond December 2020 and our old website will be closed at this point. 

Following feedback from our members we have added a google drive link for Teacher and Admin users which gives you access to our supporting pdf booklets, answers and older excel files all in one place. 

By popular request we have also replaced the test total column on the dashboard with a specific grade for each paper. This allows you to see how each of the three tests contribute to the overall grade in green. 

Many of you have been asking how to input more complex characters such as powers, roots or pi. We have added a brief tutorial to the sign on page to help students with this and the link is also included here. 

A Guide to Shortcut Keys, General Navigation and Interactive Tools

Also #2 or shift@2 for squares and #c for cube roots 

September 2020

We hope that the start to your new year is going well under difficult circumstances. After three years of redevelopment we are extremely excited to announce that we have released a new version of Methodmaths that is completely free from Flash and works beautifully on most devices including ipads. We believe it now offers the strongest online solution to both mock exams and past paper revision. Whilst we have maintained the simplicity and elegance of our old system, we have added some great new features.

Annotation tools 

Users can now annotate freely on any question so that they can demonstrate how they have arrived at an answer. This is also great for teachers should they wish to model solutions either in the classroom or online via third party video conferencing packages. Teachers can use this feature to leave written feedback with individual students. We have provided two types of annotation tool. One is a normal freehand tool for touch sensitive devices and the other is a drag and drop mouse tool for those who find number formation with a mouse difficult. 

Sophisticated Mark Schemes 

Every question contains a library of possible responses that cater for both partial marks scenarios and formatting variations. This is growing daily as we analyse input data from schools. Coupled with the ability for students to annotate their questions and the ability for teachers to adjust the mark allocation via the mark pads we believe this hybrid model can save huge amounts of teacher time whilst still delivering an incredibly accurate assessment.

Tutorials 

Methodmaths is much more than just a testing tool. It can be used to develop understanding and build confidence. For the first time we have introduced a tutorial link on every question which provides just enough support without giving the answer away. This could consist of some key facts or formulae, bar models to reveal underlying structure or step by step procedures. These are very quick to load, take less than a minute to work through and are carefully tailored to the needs of the question. Access is at the discretion of teachers. 

Method Support 

Methodmaths is designed to encourage users to break calculations down and utilise successful problem solving techniques attracting additional method marks along the way. The question mark button when selected, provides support with procedures, proofs and written communication. This is ideal for those who struggle to engage with challenging questions. Access is at the discretion of teachers. 

Topic Booklets 

We have collated hundreds of 9-1 GCSE questions from the IGCSE specification and other sources to provide you and your students with downloadable topic specific booklets. Each pdf also contains a set of solutions and can be downloaded on demand from within each online question. Access is at the discretion of teachers.

 Audio support 

We are currently adding audio support to the foundation questions. For those who need it, you can click on any sentence to hear it read aloud. 

Cross Over Questions 

Questions that appear on both foundation and higher tier are now connected so that they only need to be completed once. This is great for supporting tiering decisions as students and teachers can clearly see what is required to reach grades 3, 4 and 5 once the common content has been attempted. The dynamic performance bar at the top of the screen is largely unchanged as this has always been a motivational feature but we have fine tuned the current grade to include a progress percentage. This again is designed to encourage pursuit of the next grade. 

New Content 

Our initial release contains 30 Pearson 9-1 questions papers from November 19 back to and including November 17. We are close to completing the June 17 series and will be working our way back through the mock content as the next few months unfold.