Educational Designer

How non-routine is non-routine? The difficulty of a task is strongly related to its unfamiliarity – how different is it from tasks one has met and solved. This difference is sometimes called 'transfer distance'. Clearly, it depends on the student's prior experience, in the classroom and in life outside, of various types of problem situation and approaches to tackling them. This is true of all assessment tasks but particularly those where context is important, as with modelling real world situations with mathematics.

One way to control the transfer distance between situations that the student has met and thought about and those presented as assessment tasks is by giving advance background reading. This approach has been developed and refined by Geoffrey Wake in designing the AQA Use of Mathematics examination for 17-18 year old students. Students received a booklet to study 2 months ahead of the exam – a clean copy of which was also provided during the exam session, so it was not a case of ‘memorise this booklet’.

Students received 3 pages of advanced reading about the historical background of the need for accurate calculations of the volume of vessels of different shapes and Johannes Kepler's pioneering work to this end. The material focused on ways of estimating and calculating the volume of cones pre- and post- the development of calculus.

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