Metacognitive Maths

With the new expectations of the modern curriculum, across KS1 and through to KS5, students 'knowing' facts is no longer sufficient. Students need to be able to play their knowledge and strategies across a range of different tasks and problems, and successfully, too.

This is incredibly difficult for anyone to do, especially novice learners, so we need to provide them some scaffolds to be able to do this.

Having taken a research proven technique, metacognition.org.uk has developed several 'problem solving' templates in a variety of different formats to use.

These templates can be cut and pasted next to questions, can have the questions inserted on to them, or can be printed out and laminated so that students can write on them over and over again.

Following the research, these templates focus on the four key areas of questions: Comprehension, Connection, Strategies and Evaluation. These are the key areas students need to work through it order to tackle problem solving.

Each template also has different levels of scaffolding, depending on how advanced the student is in problem solving and how much support they may need.

As detailed in the Evaluation part of our website and in our 8-part course on Metacognition, 'Exam Wrappers' are hugely powerful tools that do three jobs at once. Firstly, they allow students to evaluate their successes on an exam paper through identifying why they made mistakes on each question. Secondly, it allows for instant feedback and so removes some of the tedious work we may have to do as teachers. Thirdly, it allows students to plan for their next test.

For example, a student may complete an Exam Wrapper and identify that their biggest issue was a failure to show their workings. You no longer need to provide further feedback, because the student has identified their issue, and now they know that in future work, showing methods and workings is their target.

The added benefit is when students discover, using the Exam Wrapper, where they need to improve, they cannot dispute it. Often students will argue against what we have identified as their weakness e.g. 'But I do read the questions carefully!'. As soon as their Wrapper says otherwise, they can no longer complain.

Below are pre-made exam wrappers for the AQA Maths GCSE. Each file is labelled with the year so that you know which papers it links to. As I complete other papers with students, I will upload new Wrappers to this page.