Re:An Ex-Teacher Made a Video Game That Skewers the No Child...
by Brakenshire on Friday April 10, 2015 @08:45AM
(#9353888)
I was just looking at a recent paper, you're right the foundation paper is pretty good in that sense:
http://filestore.aqa.org.uk/subjects/AQA-43651F-QP-NOV13.PDF
There is still some geometry which I think is a bit futile (questions 12 and 13, particularly memorizing the terminology about 'alternating angles' and so on), and perhaps a bit too much emphasis on specific ways of representing data (the pictogram and the stem and leaf chart).
But in general the emphasis on calculating costs, amounts, sizes, areas, percentages etc is, as you say, about functional numeracy.
It is multi-factoral for sure, but there is also a culture of being fine with saying "I can't do maths", and having people responding with "Yeah, I cannot do maths at all".
The exams I took had trig & literary analysis, but, then the lowest possible grade I could get was a C. The bottom set could get a D or C if they got pretty much everything in the exam right, and being sat next to someone taking those exams, I can assure you there is no trigonometry or analysis of passages in there.