The New Zealand Curriculum Framework includes information skills as one of the eight groupings of essential skills. It states (p.18) that students will:

Whereabouts?

• identify, locate, gather, store, retrieve and process information from a range of sources;
• organise, analyse, synthesize, evaluate, and use information;
• present information clearly, logically, concisely, and accurately;
• identify, describe, and interpret different points of view, and distinguish fact from opinion;
• use a range of information-retrieval and information-processing technologies confidently and competently.

These skills are clearly important to everyday life in our communities. The range and quantity of information available to us is rapidly increasing, and skill in accessing, collating, interpreting and using information is very helpful to most educational, work and leisure activities.

Students possessing well developed information skills can perform three main tasks effectively: clarifying information needs, finding and gathering relevant information, and then analysing and using that information to meet the required purposes. A substantial proportion of the intellectual demands occur during the first and third of these tasks: finding and gathering information is clearly important, but its value is greatly dependent on the extent to which it can be validly interpreted and used to answer important questions.

This chapter reports the results of fourteen information skills tasks administered to individual Mäori students in both general education settings and Mäori immersion settings. Seven tasks were administered in a videotaped one-to-one interview format, while the other seven tasks were attempted in a station or independent format (students worked independently on the tasks, with teacher support available if required for reading and writing).

National monitoring results are reported task by task so that results can be understood in relation to what the students were asked to do. To allow comparisons of performance between the 2001 and 2005 assessments, however, five of the fourteen tasks have been designated link tasks. Student performance data on these tasks are presented in this report, but the tasks are described only in general terms because they will be used again in 2005.

Four of the tasks were judged not to be suitable for comparisons of the performance of Mäori students in general education and students in Mäori immersion settings. The reasons for these exclusions are presented in the commentaries accompanying the tasks.

Among the remaining ten tasks, Mäori students in general education and students in Mäori immersion settings performed equally well on four of the tasks. Mäori students in general education scored statistically significantly higher on six tasks. These comparisons must be interpreted with considerable caution, for the reasons discussed in Chapter 2.