An Investigation into Students' Global A-Level Mathematics Performance and their Performance in Routine and Non-Routine Questions

Start date: 1 January 1997
End date: 31 January 1997
Co-investigators: 00045312; John Berry - University of Plymouth; Peter Johnson - University of Leeds; Wendy Maull - University of Plymouth

The University of Leeds work was supported by the Departmental Investment and Restructuring Fund, University of Leeds. The project team would like to thank the Research & Evaluation Division of the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate for providing A-level Mathematics scripts. Several schools in the Plymouth and Leeds regions assisted the project team. Special thanks is given to Susan Metcalfe of Heckmondwike Grammar School.

Two files below provide details of the project. The PME paper provides an 8 page summary of the project. After that is the project report which provides a little extra detail.

The project was fun and, we hope, useful but it raised many more questions than it answered. One upshot of the project is that all of us involved will be very careful in our future use of the word 'routine'!

Project Publications

BERRY, J., JOHNSON, P., MONAGHAN, J. & MAULL, W. (1999). Routine Questions and Examination Performance, in Proceedings of the 23rd Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Haifa, Israel. Vol. 2, pp.105-112. ISSN 0771-100X.