About the resources
This suite of resources has been designed to go some way towards addressing the gulf between weak higher students and the demands of AS-level mathematics, with the aim of making AS-level mathematics more accessible to a greater number of students.
This set of resources was made available to a group of 8 students who wanted to take AS-level maths but who had studied the old intermediate level at GCSE. They came in for 3 mornings after their GCSE examinations had finished and spent 3 hours on each topic - Quadratics, Straight Lines and Vectors, Trigonometry and Circle Theorems. The sessions consisted of a taught hour, followed by an hour of independent study, working through resources, etc, followed by a further hour of study, after which a homework task was set. In addition, all the resources were made available to the students outside of school via a VLE (virtual learning environment). At the end of the three weeks we gave the students a test on the material covered.
The lesson plans are deliberately not prescriptive. We have endeavoured to build resources that will help students bridge certain key gaps in their knowledge, with the assumption that we are never going to be able to fill all of the gaps! For this reason, the lesson plans consist of objectives, with files that can be used in order to cover them.
John Coats
Notre Dame High School, Sheffield