PAM Maths Skills Check 1

The Primary Assertive Mentoring team have created this app for the Maths weekly skills checks so that the system becomes paperless; it saves teachers time; the marking is done by the app and scores are colour coded and stored on the app.

The approach that the teacher uses remains basically the same as you've been using with the paper version because it's the approach that makes it work. The pupils access their app...they go to weekly skills check one if it's week one; two if it’s week two etc. The pupils then see question one and they work out the answer and select from a multiple choice of up to five answers.

They can do their working out on scrap paper so the teacher/TA can quickly spot what they might be doing wrong. It would be hard for pupils to simply guess the correct answer since the other incorrect answers are usually common incorrect responses. There is a feature on the app that allows the teacher to let the pupils see a prompt if they get stuck on a question but the teacher can keep this switched off if s/he wants to see how the pupils score without using prompts.

At the end of the skills check, the app gives the child their score and colour and it also shows their previous ten scores and colours so that they can see their progression.

Having completed the skills check, the app allows the pupils to go through each question to see which ones they got right and which ones they got wrong. Here the teacher can teach to any of the common class/group misconceptions. The pupil prompts are live in the answer section so that you can use them as a teaching aid. So with this app, you get all the benefits of the paper system that you currently use but with all the advantage of it being done on an app. You should see a big saving on photocopying costs and in saving of teacher time.

So why don't you download this app yourself and do one of the weekly skills checks and I'm sure you'll be convinced that they'll be great for your class/school in general.