The focus of this chapter is on students' performance in spelling, punctuation and handwriting, using tasks specifically designed for this purpose. These skills were also assessed more indirectly within some of the tasks in Chapters 3 and 4.

The results for seven tasks are reported here. The handwriting task was identical for year 4 and year 8 students. Two tasks were administered only to year 4 students, and four tasks were administered only to year 8 students. The four year 8 tasks consisted of a matched pair of punctuation tasks and a matched pair of spelling tasks. Within each matched pair, the spelling or punctuation task was the same — the only difference was the mode of delivery of the task (laptop computer or paper-and-pencil).

Four tasks were administered using the stations approach, two using the one to one approach, and one using the independent approach.

Three of the tasks have been selected as link tasks (to be used again in the year 2002) and therefore are not described in detail here. One link task was attempted only by year 4 students and the other two only by year 8 students. The other four tasks are released tasks for which full details are given.

The tasks are presented in the following order:

There was a marked improvement in handwriting from year 4 to year 8, with an average of 22 percent more year 8 than year 4 students gaining the highest scores on each attribute. Differences in writing speed were far greater, with 58 percent of year 8 students copying the prescribed sentence six or more times, compared to 2 percent of year 4 students. The spelling and punctuation results revealed considerable score for improvement at both age levels: few students made most of the changes required, and some made very few correct changes along with several inappropriate ones. When both computer-presented and paper-and-pencil versions of the same tasks were attempted by year 8 students, the results achieved were very similar but the computer version was much more popular. For instance, the same punctuation task was rated positively by only 30 percent of year 8 students when presented as a paper-and-pencil task (the least popular task in all of the 1998 assessments), but was rated positively by 71 percent of students when presented on a laptop computer.