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Introduction
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The assessments included six tasks investigating students’ knowledge, understandings and processes in the area of social studies called time, continuity and change. This area focuses on relationships between people and events through time, and the interpretation of these relationships. Two tasks were identical for both year 4 and year 8, one was administered only to year 4 students, and three were administered only to year 8 students. Three are trend tasks (fully described with data for both 1997 and 2001), one is a released task (fully described with data for 2001 only), and two are link tasks (to be used again in 2005, so only partially described here). The tasks are presented in the three sections: trend tasks, then the released task, and finally link tasks. Within each section, tasks attempted (in whole or part) by both year 4 and year 8 students are presented first, followed by tasks attempted only by year 4 students and then tasks attempted only by year 8 students. Averaged across 21 task components administered to both year 4 and year 8 students, 16 percent more year 8 than year 4 students succeeded with these components. Year 8 students performed better on 19 of the 21 components. There was evidence of useful improvement between 1997 and 2001 on the single trend task for year 4 students, but little change over the same period on the two trend tasks for year 8 students. Averaged across 12 trend task components attempted by year 4 students in both years, 6 percent more students succeeded in 2001 than in 1997. Gains occurred on 11 of the 12 components. At year 8 level, with 28 trend task components included, 2 percent more students succeeded in 2001 than in 1997. Gains occurred on 16 of the 28 components. Because these tasks required knowledge or understanding of history or the cause and effects of historical changes, and these are things that students learn about rather than experience, performance on these tasks was not strong. In particular, students showed quite limited knowledge of New Zealand history |
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