PEAR: Physics Exercises for Assessment and Revision (Version A)

This package, which comes on three floppy disks with associated documentation, provides a large bank of resource material for teachers to use in preparing students for the NEAB examination syllabus (Years 10 and 11). The version tested covered the requirements of syllabuses 1201 - Co-ordinated Science (Physics) and 1181 - Single Physics. Topics applicable only to Higher level and/or Single Physics extra topics are clearly identified. A separate version is available covering syllabus 1206 - Modular science (Physics). The core of the material consists of 66 worksheets grouped according to six broad topics (electricity, forces, waves, space, power and radioactivity), ready for printing and distributing to students as classroom activity or homework. An individual worksheet is a self-contained item, which students can work through at their own pace but should be able to complete in about half an hour. The presentation is clear, although the fact that each sheet has been designed to print neatly within a single A4 portrait format page makes the layout slightly cramped on occasion. Diagrams are simple but bold and attractive. There is a great variety of material presented, with plenty of examples based on real life situations and applications. Eventually a student's completed worksheets will build into a useful portfolio of material, which is likely to appear more accessible for revision purposes than a textbook. Virtually all the sheets begin with simple sentence completion exercises, designed to give even weaker students an encouraging start. Thereafter, there are a wide variety of exercise types, to give students experience of the range of question formats they might face in the exam. These include graph plotting and interpretation, calculations and data analysis, labelling or completion of diagrams and explaining devices or situations; in the case of this last category of question, a list of salient facts is provided in the form of short notes. An excellent feature is the clear distinction that is made between formulae that will be given in the exam - which students simply have to be able to use - and those they are required to recall; although the latter are provided on the worksheets, enabling students to tackle the exercises without recourse to other texts, they are always accompanied by warning statements that these equations do eventually have to be memorized. Revision sheets with information and rubrics presented exactly as they would be in the exam allow a check that the essential equations have indeed been learned. Answer sheets are also provided. These follow a `template' style, which is labour-saving for the teacher, and for convenience mark schemes allocate a total of 20 marks to each sheet. Answers are given for all questions, with full working shown for many of the numerical ones, although this is somewhat spare in places and often non-existent for the formats that require students to complete a table of values. The authors suggest that the answer sheets could equally well be distributed to students so they can mark their own work and obtain `constructive feedback'. However, some of the answers are not very user-friendly, and points such as the importance of showing the working, attaching units to physical quantities, etc, tend to be emphasized through the mark scheme rather than through model answers. Further explanations from the teacher would certainly be necessary to supplement the answer sheets for students with areas of real weakness. The templates also include a useful set of pro-forma sheets for recording performance by topic, both for a class and as personal scores for each student - a genuine aid for the teacher in identifying areas on which particular students need to concentrate. The package itself is extremely easy to navigate. A split screen layout allows the user to interact with the contents lists and a couple of mouse clicks bring up any individual sheet for preview. An interactive index allows searches to be made by keyword, a facility that was greatly appreciated by this reviewer as some of the groupings within the contents list were not immediately helpful to someone unfamiliar with this particular syllabus. (For example, worksheets on thermal energy and convection appear in the `Power' folder.) The index is very comprehensive: for instance, the term `critical' retrieves critical overload current, critical breakdown, chain reaction going critical and critical angle. As a backup for teachers this package has a great deal to offer, and although it is designed to fit one specific syllabus it could be used flexibly in many classes for tests or revision, or simply as a source of ideas and questions. It provides a good variety of material and will certainly help to reduce preparation and marking times for overloaded teachers. The answer sheets are probably too minimalist for the package to be used extensively by students as learning tool without supporting feedback from a teacher, but then the package is clearly designed for classroom use. Any school physics department would find it an excellent addition to their resource.