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National Education Monitoring
ISSN 1174 - 247X
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Email : earu@otago.ac.nz  
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Fax 64 3 479 8561

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Last updated October 2008
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The three reports on the 1998 assessment results were considered by a national forum of curriculum and assessment specialists, principals, teachers, advisers and representatives of national educational organisations. Their comments highlight what students are generally doing well, and those areas where improvements are desirable.

The Listening & Viewing, Writing, and Health & Physical Education reports are the fourth set of reports presented during the first four year cycle of national monitoring. They add to the nine reports produced from assessments conducted in 1995, 1996 and 1997 (Science; Art; Graphs, Tables & Maps; Reading & Speaking; Music; Technology; Mathematics; Social Studies; and Information Skills). The second four year cycle of national monitoring begins in 1999 with re-assessment in Science, Art, Graphs, Tables & Maps. Results from the second cycle will allow comparisons with performances in the previous cycle of assessments.

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LISTENING & VIEWING 1998
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LISTENING – GOOD NEWS 
Year 4 and year 8 students were able to identify and recall facts and comprehend literal meanings from a wide range of information.

Students responded well to listening tasks with contexts that were functional and related to their own experiences.

Year 8 students showed considerable skill in working with technical language and in answering questions that required them to make inferences or give multiple responses.

VIEWING – GOOD NEWS 
Many year 4 and year 8 students showed good understanding of basic messages contained in visual information.

Year 8 students were able to explain and justify criteria and choices when eval-uating visual material that had high impact and familiarity.

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LISTENING – CONCERNS
Although students typically attended to more obvious surface level information, they were not so successful in thinking critically about underlying meanings in messages.

Year 8 students found it difficult to sustain careful listening when the content did not appeal to their immediate interests.

VIEWING – CONCERNS
Both year 4 and year 8 students were largely unsuccessful in looking beyond obvious visual features. Skills were not confidently demonstrated in areas of critical viewing, interpretation, identification of visual codes, understanding of how impact is created, and awareness of how techniques are used to manipulate the viewer’s response.

Students extracted basic meanings from visual information but didn’t demonstrate the ability to adequately explain ideas and justify their responses.

LOOKING AHEAD –
SUGGESTIONS FOR PROGRESS

Student learning could be improved by:

• providing regular opportunities with a variety of contexts, media and information to practise identifying, analysing and interpreting main ideas;

• encouraging discussion, explanation and justification of the meanings they give to messages and information;

• helping them to develop and rehearse strategies for effective listening, such as identification of purpose, checking accuracy of recall, seeking and giving feedback, and probing meanings and issues;

• developing attitudes needed to attend to the detail of information and messages that may not have immediate personal interest yet require an active response.



HEALTH & PHYSICAL EDUCATION 1998
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NOTE: Tasks are grouped together in NEMP reports so that they generally fit the various curriculum strands. Sometimes practical constraints prevent a balanced representation of learning outcomes sought in a strand. The tasks in chapter 6 of Health and Physical Education Assessment Results 1998 cover only part of the Healthy Communities and Environment strand.

HEALTH – GOOD NEWS 
Over 90 percent of students recognise the usefulness of learning about health.

..High percentages of year 4 and year 8 students feel comfortable asking an adult to help in a bullying situation.

Year 4 and year 8 students placed high importance on social behaviour and skills as criteria for choosing a partner to work with.


Most students are knowledgeable about the construction and meaning of the food pyramid.

The majority of year 8 students said they didn’t think they would try smoking.

PHYSICAL EDUCATION – GOOD NEWS
 
Both year 4 and year 8 students are specially enthusiastic about physical education. It was the favourite of twelve curriculum areas for year 8 students, and the second most popular for year 4 students.

Substantial improvement is made from year 4 to year 8 on physical education tasks. Most year 4 and year 8 students are performing well to moderately well on a wide range of movement skills.
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CONCERNS
Most students’ perspective of health and physical education focussed substantially on the physical aspect. The importance of social, emotional, intellectual and spiritual factors was not sufficiently understood.

Many students restricted their view of safety to personal responsibility without recognising the importance of mutual care.

There was little improvement from year 4 to year 8 in recognition and understanding of risk management strategies.

Many students did not distinguish between the long term and short term effects of smoking.

Substantial differences between girls and boys were evident in key aspects. Girls outperformed boys in physical agilities and relationships issues; boys out-performed girls in ball handling.

Health was the least popular of 12 school subjects at both year levels. Only 2 percent of students rated health as a favourite subject.

Small proportions of year 4 (5 percent) and year 8 (4 percent) students expressed
enthusiasm for Te Reo Kori. This could be detrimental to achieving cultural
inclusiveness in physical education.

LOOKING AHEAD –
SUGGESTIONS FOR PROGRESS

Learning could be improved by:

• Helping students to understand the meaning, scope and value of health education and the interrelationships of social, emotional, spiritual, physical and intellectual dimensions of total well-being;

• Linking the learning of knowledge to practical applications, experiences and decision
making;

. • Providing frequent opportunities for students to develop critical thinking skills;

• Finding ways to utilise students’ strongly positive attitudes towards physical education to benefit learning in other areas of the curriculum;

• Identifying and addressing barriers to learning arising from expectations and learning programmes that favour one gender over the other.



WRITING 1998
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GOOD NEWS 
Students were able to engage in a wide variety of writing tasks in a short time without preliminary motivation and guidance from a class teacher. Many students’ attempts at independent writing under these assessment conditions were impressive.

72 percent of year 4 students and 60 percent of year 8 students reported a positive feeling about writing. This is a considerable improvement over attitudes reported in local and international surveys in the past. It may reflect the influence in recent years of more liberal approaches to writing.
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There is evidence of considerable improvement in functional writing and spelling between year 4 and year 8. Typical gains of over 30 percent are amongst the highest seen in NEMP subject reports.

A fresh personal voice is apparent in numerous examples of children’s writing. This reflects a confidence and willingness to try out new ideas. In fact, many students believe that the best ways to become a good writer are to “use your imagination” and “try out new ideas”.

Tasks that were clearly prescriptive of what students were to write were handled well. Where students saw a clear purpose or structure for their writing, they ach-ieved better than in more open-ended writing tasks.
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CONCERNS 
When provided with the opportunity to edit, there was a low frequency of self-correction in both meaning and surface features (e.g. punctuation and spelling).

Boys are not achieving as well as girls in the majority of tasks, and their attitudes to writing are not as positive. These gaps need to be addressed in schools and in research.

Although there was a considerable improvement in spelling between year 4 and year 8, there is still concern about level of spelling ability particularly at year 4. Many students appear to be better at avoiding errors in their own writing than detecting errors in the writing of others.

A very wide range of ability in writing was evident. Differences in performance were especially apparent between low decile schools and the rest, indicating a polarisation of achievement levels in our schools.

Half of the year 8 students report that they are writing no more than once a week. If this is a correct perception, then they are not writing often enough to improve. If this is not correct, the links between scheduled writing sessions and writing in other learning areas should be clarified.

Too many pupils did not know what their teachers thought about their writing. This suggests a lack of regular or appropriate teacher feedback.

LOOKING AHEAD –
SUGGESTIONS FOR PROGRESS

Editing
Schools need to further develop teaching practices on such matters as error identification, self-correction of errors, vocabulary enrichment, development of a spelling conscience from an early age, and engaging in shared writing to provide good models.
Developing a sense of audience
Students seem to need more practice at sharing their writing with others in order to develop a sense of audience and clarity of communication. There is a need to extend the range of audiences outside the classroom. This would require students to also develop sharing, listening and questioning skills.
Gender Gap
We need to continue to encourage boys to take a more positive attitude towards writing. This could be done by investigating and choosing types of writing tasks boys find most engaging, inviting male writers to visit the school, as well as females, and considering the kind of reading materials available to boys.
Frequency of Writing
Pupils need more frequent practice at all forms of writing. The benefits of shared and guided writing should be recognised.
Communication with Parents Schools should continue to encourage parents in ways of supporting their children’s writing development.



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The 1998 NEMP assessments have provided some good news about the achievements and attitudes of Mäori students. They outperformed non-Mäori students at both year 4 and year 8 on a number of physical education tasks, and year 4 Mäori students were more positive than non-Mäori in their enjoyment of writing and in their attitudes towards health education. Once again the results suggest that Mäori students perform better on tasks when they can relate to the contexts, the activities involve practical applications of learning, and they are able to work together with others in paired or team situations.

Listening and Viewing

There were substantial differences at year 4, with non-Mäori students outperforming Mäori students on about half of the tasks. This was not the case at year 8 where Mäori and non-Mäori students performed similarly on 67 percent of the tasks.

Health
Mäori students performed as well as non-Mäori students on 75 percent of the health tasks. Year 4 Mäori students were more positive than non-Mäori students in their attitudes towards learning in this curriculum area.

At the year 8 level a number of tasks focussed on health risks which are specially relevant to Mäori people, yet scores on these tasks declined as the proportion of Mäori students in a school increased.

Physical Education

In physical education Mäori students at both levels gained significantly higher scores than non-Mäori students on 20 to 30 percent of the tasks. Mäori students achieved as well as non-Mäori on all remaining year 4 tasks and all except one year 8 task.

.Writing
Mäori students performed as well as non-Mäori on 60 percent of the writing tasks. On the remaining 40 percent of tasks non-Mäori performed significantly better. There was no clear pattern in the type of writing tasks that suited or challenged Mäori students.

It is a matter of concern that serious gaps between Mäori and non-Mäori achievement are not being reduced from year 4 to year 8.

Moving Forward
The results identified a number of areas in which Ma¯ori students performed well. They also showed some serious gaps between Ma¯ori and non-Ma¯ori achievement. It is important that schools and teachers look for ways to take advantage of Ma¯ori students’ strengths and successes to support their learning in other areas.



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Contact Details:   Email : earu@otago.ac.nz   |   Freephone 0800 808 561   |   Fax 64 3 479 8561   |   October 2008