Our Approach

 

ICCAMS Diagram
 

Lesson Structure

The ICCAMS materials consist of 40 lessons and 20 assessment starter activities produced by the ICCAMS project to help teachers use formative assessment in secondary mathematics lessons.

The lessons are split equally between Algebra and Multiplicative Reasoning. These are two topics which students have struggled with historically.

Each Lesson is comprised of three components:

• a starter assessment activity
which provides teachers with feedback on their students’ understanding of a particular concept;

• Lesson components A
and B
, each of which consolidate, extend or elaborate the concept introduced in the Starter.

Formative Assessment

The starter activities are designed to help teachers identify challenges experienced by their students
The lessons then provide advice, guidance and strategies for dealing with these.

Collaborative Working

The lessons promote collaborative working
and both group and whole-class discussions. The ICCAMS team believes that productive mathematical discussions are an integral part of the process of developing mathematical understanding, and engagement with sample student working provides one means in which this intention is prioritised.

Use of realistic contexts

The lessons draw on realistic contexts
This provides meaning to mathematical concepts and facilitates the move from concrete to abstract understanding and generalisation.

Connectionist approach

The lessons make explicit links between different mathematical concepts
to promote a view of mathematics as a connected body of knowledge.

Multiple representations and models

The lessons make deliberate use of multiple representations of mathematical concepts and mini-models
(e.g. the Double Number Line) to investigate mathematical structures.