There is also a good deal of evidence that the use of worked examples can
be helpful in introducing new ideas (Booth et al., 2017; Sweller et al., 2019).
Particularly effective are ‘completion problems’ where students are given
partial solutions and required to complete them. These can help students to
focus on the examples but also manage the difficulty level while retaining
authentic tasks

Great Teaching Toolkit – Evidence Review, June 2020 Rob Coe, C.J. Rauch, Stuart Kime, Dan Singleton

In dimension 4, Activating Hard Thinking, we see this element on explaining. Part-worked examples can be so useful when presenting new concepts and ideas to students.

So to a collection of fill in the blanks type resources:

The trigonometry activity above is from Andy Lutwyche; Andy has other resources in his fill in the blanks series. Searching his TES resources on “fill in the blanks“, returns other fill in the blanks resources and also other resources where students must complete missing information such as his What was the question or Spiders collections. Some of Andy’s latest resources include his Lazy Lionel resources, Lionel does not show his working, so loses marks! We also have Hasty Hazel and Methodical Mabel, this really is excellent and I’m sure can promote excellent conversations in the classroom on misconceptions and showing sufficient working. And I must include Andy’s brilliant resource on the quadratic formula and note this on quadratic inequalities,it’s great to see the sketches in a resource like this. Andy’s resources can also be found on his own website, Andy Lutwyche. This search on fill in the blanks includes several resources.

Check the slides here for these great resources:

So many great Maths teachers share their resources, for more of this type of activity, check these slides for more examples. On Dr Austin Maths, you will find several Fill In The Blanks resources in many topic areas; each index shows the resource type.

From Jonathan Hall on Mathsbot, Directed Number is one of his many excellent and still growing collection of Completion Tables.

These are fully customizable, choose the colums you want, the number of rows and also very importantly the cells you want to display which allows you to set a variety of question types and progressivley challenging examples. To select the cells you want each individual cell toggles to show or hide the contents.

Open Middle has numerous problems where students must fill empty boxes to make correct statements, these problems really make students think hard.

Further examples can be found on:

• Mr Day Maths – Factor Trees. Nathan Day has other Completion Tables resources – see for example Area and Perimeter Completion Tables. Check Nathan’s Contents, and scroll down to Tasks for further Completion Tables.
• Rob Southern has this Coordinate Geometry exercise as part of his A Level Pure 1 Year 1 collection. Note his questions to consider. You can also find a version on Transum, Coordinate Geometry Table which allows answers to be checked.
• Undergound Maths, Two-way functions
• Starting Points Maths, Chris McGrane has many completion type resources, see Prime Factorisation for example.
• Purposeful Maths, for I do, we do, you do resources
• On TickTockMaths, try Rationalising the denominator
• Access Maths, see this search on “Fill in the blanks“