I genuinely believe that the move away from modular was a good thing. It has enabled us to explore connections between different areas of Mathematics. Unfortunately there is too much content, which makes it hard to do this effectively.
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I think you could lose some of the smaller topics, such as numerical methods and small angle approximations. However, I think we would all be happy with the spec if we had more time to teach it.
The Edexcel spec suggests 360 hours to teach the A level, roughly 6 hours a week. I don't know any schools that get this. We get 4. I know this isn't the fault of exam boards but it's a significant issue.
Also, there is a lot of content that has only ever been examined at AS. I've never seen a vertical motion question on an A2 mechanics paper, for example.
And the LDS has been a disaster. I think the availability of ICT in schools was vastly overestimated when it was conceived that we would be using the LDS to teach the stats. And as soon as it was decided that LDS knowledge would be worth 3 marks max, an incentive to do this was removed.
We've tried very hard to interweave the LDS (and other real data sets) into our schemes of work, and I think it works pretty well. But I can see it's one of those things that is great in principle, but hard in practice, and of the payoff is small, then it gets put on the back burner.
But I also believe we shouldn't teach stats without getting stuck in to some (sometimes messy, awkward) data sets; otherwise it gets reduced to a set of procedures with no grounding in actual applications.
I agree, but it's really hard to do this unless the students have access to the tech to be able to manipulate the data themselves. Most schools simply don't have the capacity to provide this but I think the spec was written assuming they did.
Yeah, very good point. Access to individual computers is essential to really get into the nitty gritty. Teacher demonstration is fine as far as it goes, but not as the only way of looking at data.
Despite my best efforts to the contrary, some of my best )& most vocal students) are very open about how much they dislike the LDS. For them, it’s the seemingly pointless rote learning of the units/locations etc that they see no worth in.
The Large Data Set is the only part of the A level specification where I've heard teachers deciding to teach it or not based on the number of marks in the exam.
Are there other bits of the course where you decide whether to teach it or not based on the number of marks?
Too much content is the problem with the maths curriculum from KS1 all the way through.It feels like the days of you either get maths or not. We haven't got time to practice for the majority and only those who remember it the first time around make the progress..
...(singles and furthers) leaving time for revision. We have 13x45-minute periods a fortnight for single mathematicians and 23 for furthers, which equates to a total of around 260 hours and 470 hours of teaching time respectively.
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What content would you remove in order to allow sufficient time to explore the interconnection between the topics?
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some of the stats is so broad in it's reach that you can spend ages teaching material that is barely tested. Just hammer the hypothesis testing.
Are there other bits of the course where you decide whether to teach it or not based on the number of marks?
I think the LDS is unique in this regard as it is the only topic that has a specific cap on the number of marks attached to it.
I don't find the content too much, though, and we've usually finished by about now in the year...