Here’s How Your Teenager Improves At GCSE Maths

You need to know about the 4 and a half buckets

As some of you will know,

I feel very passionate about helping students traverse the archaic and disempowering GCSE exams.

As it happens,

Maths is the subject that I have tutored for 8 years,

And therefore, I can write about it from the greatest amount of experience.

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Every question in maths GCSE can be simplified into 4 and half concepts.

Or buckets if you will.

In my experience,

Students struggle with feeling overwhelmed by all the content in maths,

And struggle to know how to apply the content to the annoying wordy questions.

By simplifying what you need to know into 4 and a half buckets,

Students are able to improve their foundational skills in a much more strategic manner,

And will improve their ability to know where to start when approaching questions in the exam.

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What are the 4 and a half buckets?

Bucket 1:

Numbers

Bucket 2:

Graphs

Bucket 3:

Shapes

Bucket 4:

Algebra

Bucket 4.5:

Ratios

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What should you do with this information?

There are two ways that I think I can help any parents or teenagers reading this.

Firstly, I am going to outline how these buckets are not equally important.

Secondly, I am going to summarise the fundamental areas within each bucket that all students need to ensure they are competent in.

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Prioritisation

I spent over 100 hours statistically analysing maths and science GCSE past papers to find out which questions come up most often.

I found out that for GCSE foundation papers the order of the buckets above (with numbers at the top and ratios at the bottom) is the order of importance in terms of marks awarded in the papers.

I was surprised at algebra not being more important,

And it stuck me seeing how many marks are available for pure ‘numbers’ related questions.

Higher papers follow a similar pattern except for the fact that algebra does become more important – albeit perhaps still not quite as important as I would have expected.

Students need to develop competent fundamentals in all of the buckets,

However, I believe they can feel slightly less stressed if they haven’t mastered algebra just yet (especially if they are doing the foundation paper).

The fundamental concepts in each bucket

If I was a parent who wanted to help my Year 7 -11 teenager feel more confident in maths GCSE,

These are the concepts I would be encouraging them to practice and test them on.

I have again broadly listed them in priority order:

Numbers:

- Division when the answer is a decimal and long multiplication

- Changing between fractions, decimals and percentages

- +/-/x/dividing fractions

- Negative Numbers – dividing, multiplying.

- Mean, Median, Mode & Range

Graphs:

This is a difficult bucket to casually test a student on. I would prioritise familiarizing myself with pie charts, bar charts and tables – specifically looking into the common questions that are asked on each.

Shapes:

For now, this bucket is more about memorisation.

- Area of a triangle and circle.

- Perimeter of a circle.

- Volume of a cuboid.

- How to find the area of an irregular shape – this is commonly asked where two regular shapes are joined together.

- Angles – total angels in a 3- and 4-sided shape. Angles along a straight line = 180 degrees.

Algebra:

- What does 2X mean?

- Adding/Subtracting rules – you can only add and subtract ‘like terms.’

- Multiplying and dividing algebra (E.G. Y^6 X Y^4 = Y^10).

- Simplifying algebraic equations – collecting like terms.

- Expanding single bracket algebraic equations.

- Solving equations with an equals sign (E.G. 3X – 10 = -5X +6).

Ratios:

At a fundamental level only a simple understanding of ratios is required and it is less important than the other buckets listed.

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I hope you all have a great week ahead,

Best wishes,

Joel

P.S If you are looking for some revision coaching or tutoring send me an email at joel@ilscoaching.co.uk and we can have a chat – we are only taking on new year 11 or 13 clients for another week or two.