The seven tasks reported in this chapter involved students in responding to a variety of art works which were represented in photographic reproductions.

Landscapes

The tasks asked students to examine and describe content, form, style and imagery. They also asked students to identify media and processes used in the making of art works, and to express a personal response to observed images. All seven tasks were administered in one-to-one interviews.

The majority of the examples used in the tasks were works by New Zealand artists or artefacts representative of cultures which are an important part of New Zealand society.

All seven responding tasks were substantially the same for year 4 and year 8 students in the questions asked and procedures followed. However, changes were made in the selection or number of images used at year 4 and year 8 in four tasks: Two Paintings, Art Objects A, Whakairo Rkau and Link Task 3. The changes were made in consideration of appropriateness to the different year levels of students.

One of the seven tasks is a trend task (fully described with data for both 1995 and 1999), four are released tasks (fully described with data for 1999 only), and two are link tasks (to be used again in 2003 so only partially described here).

The information provided for each trend or released task includes

• full description of the task;
• data showing the performance of students in relation to marking criteria.

Full task descriptions are not provided for the two link tasks.

Comparing results for year 4 and year 8 students
While it is not appropriate to collapse data from across all seven responding tasks for purposes of comparing the overall performances of year 4 and year 8 students, the results in all tasks show a general pattern of improvement in knowledge and skills from year 4 to year 8.

Trend task: comparing 1995 and 1999 results
The one trend task (Two Paintings) was administered to year 4 and year 8 students in both the 1995 and 1999 assessments. The distribution of global ratings on the 6 point scale shows little difference from 1995 to 1999 at year 4 and year 8. There were no differences between 1995 and 1999 in the mean global ratings achieved at year 4 and year 8.