Edexcel Topic Tutor: 2-tier GCSE Maths Higher [Paperback]

My daughter was freaking out about her Maths GCSE higher tier. She had a terrible maths teacher who was often off sick and so had a lot of subs covering lessons. She hadn't managed to cover the whole curriculum and from a strong start with an A grade in the stats paper she did in year 10, her module results were getting worse. She didn't want to get a tutor and we didn't realsie just how bad things had got until quite late in the day. Having done my Maths O level back in 1979 I wasn't too sure of some of stuff when it came to helping and a lot stuff like proofs and significant numbers etc I had never studied.
Anyway someone had reccomended this book on the student Room and so although there were no reviews I took a punt on it and what a result!
The book has a range of questions from past papers (so your child may have come across some questions before)subdivided into neat topic sections. Basically you go off and answer the questions as best you can- mark them and then - and this is the best bit - you can put the disc in your computer and get a blow by blow account of how to tackle each question. The disc is very basic - a guy narrates the answer and believe me we got very used to hearing his voice - and the line he narrates is scribbled on a pop up screen complete with mathematical notation. My daughter together often with me used this technique over the course of about a week before her first final maths paper ( and a module resit) and her maths significantly improved - between us we were able to decode what had to be done and although some topics still eluded her (and me) she felt a lot more confident about the exam and thought she might scrape a C (before using the book and disc she was scoring D's in past and practice papers and by the end was scoring highish B's)

Amazingly she managed to get a low A grade - but an A none the less in GCSE this summer and was very happy - although she won't be studying maths at A level.

Every student should be told about this or it should be used in schools as a revision strategy - it much, much better than the CGP book her comprehensive had us buy for revision. I can't praise it enough. There is also one for A level which her 6th form college had all the AS students buy in the first week!

For us it was a lifesaver (only problem we encountered was that the disc loaded
no problem on our big computer (windows Xp) but was rejected and ejected by our laptop (windows vista) not sure if windows was the problem or somother conflict.)