: Introduction
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The assessments included eight tasks investigating students’ knowledge, understandings and processes in the area of time, continuity and change. This area focuses on relationships between people and events through time, and the interpretation of these relationships.

Five tasks were identical for both year 4 and year 8 students and three were administered only to year 8 students. Two are trend tasks (fully described with data for both 2001 and 2005), two are released tasks (fully described with data for 2005 only) and four are link tasks (to be used again in 2009, so only partially described here).

The tasks are presented in the three sections: trend tasks, then released tasks and finally link tasks. Within each section, tasks attempted by both year 4 and year 8 students are presented first, followed by tasks attempted only by year 8 students.

Averaged across 28 task components administered to both year 4 and year 8 students, 23 percent more year 8 than year 4 students succeeded with these components. Year 8 students performed better on 25 of the 28 components.

There was evidence of useful improvement between 2001 and 2005 on the single trend task for year 4 students and the two trend tasks for year 8 students. Because the improvements were mainly associated with four components of a single task (Rodney’s Window), these results should be interpreted with caution. Averaged across the four trend task components attempted by year 4 students in both years, nine percent more students succeeded in 2005 than in 2001. Gains occurred on all four components. At year 8 level, with 15 trend task components included, seven percent more students succeeded in 2005 than in 2001. Gains occurred on 12 of the 15 components.

Most students at both year levels could identify visible changes that had occurred across time. Year 8 students were much better able than year 4 students to explain good and bad implications of these changes for people living in the different times. Substantial numbers of year 8 students showed significant knowledge of New Zealand history, but only a minority had reasonable knowledge of the timing of major events. Understandably, year 4 students had very limited historical knowledge. About half of year 8 students could talk about one or more current world issues, with most of the remainder mentioning at least one national or local issue instead. Faced with the same task, about half of the year 4 students were not able to articulate any relevant issue (local, national or international).
  
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