Session 2 at #MathsConf7 was delivered by Christine Andrews, Andrew Taylor and Gary Wing, and looked at the developments and questions about the new Maths A Level for AQA. This blog is just my interpretation of their workshop, and shouldn't be taken as gospel, although I've tried to reproduce accurately what was said. It's also worth remembering that these materials are still in draft form, and have not been accredited by Ofqual yet.

The session looked at many more than the titular 10 issues, and provided a lot of food for thought - I'm looking forward to teaching the new A Level, but it will be hard to mentally move away from the modular system.

Teaching and examining using the "large data set"
Many of the Statistics questions will now be based on a "large data set"; AQA have chosen Family Food, which is published by the Office for National Statistics every December. Christine clarified that this selection would not change through the lifetime of the specification, but that the updated version would be used every year, and examination questions would be set using the most recent set of data; I took this to mean that exams in summer 2018 would use data published at the end of 2016. Christine also highlighted that teaching using the data set would not be compulsory, but that familiarity with the scenarios and language used would be advantageous in an exam situation (see example below: Paper 2, Q14 from the AS Level papers, available here). This approach would certainly make the teaching of statistics more coherent, and give lots of time for real in-depth analysis of one problem, as opposed to skimming over the surface of many different scenarios. Gary highlighted the opportunities to investigate these data further using technology such as Excel and MatLab.

Peter Mattock's session at #mathsconf5 (Concrete Approaches to Abstract Mathematics) was great and gave me a lot of takeaways, so signing up for this one as my first session seemed like a no-brainer. I wasn't disappointed; this time, Peter looked in depth at fifteen topics that can lead to misleading assumptions by pupils, and challenged us to come up with examples that "broke the mould".

We started with a little game; Peter asked us to come up with examples we could use to teach particular topics, such as a solvable linear equation or a diagram for teaching parallel line properties. I could sort-of see where this was going, but I decided to embrace the task as it was designed and go for my first idea for each example. We were then awarded points for the predictability of our answers - I scored a whopping 17/20 on my first go with some completely textbook examples. Peter then asked us to improve these examples to come up with a problem set that would score zero. I've neatened up (but not censored!) and scanned my notes below, with the original example on the left and improved examples on the right.