Contact details:
Email : earu@otago.ac.nz  
Freephone 0800 808 561
Fax 64 3 479 8561

Kei te hängai te titiro a ngä tängata o Aotearoa ki te ekenga paetae a ngä äkonga me te kounga o te mätauranga. He wähanga te Kaupapa Aroturuki Mätauranga ä-Motu (NEMP) o te rautaki a te Käwanatanga ki te tukutuku i ënei pärongo.

New Zealanders are interested in student achievement and the quality of education. The National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) is part of Government strategy to provide this information.

Good News

• Many students are capable of reading and extracting general infor-mation from a range of sources.
  
  
• Many students were able to sequence and process information relatively well.
  
  
• Students have positive attitudes towards activities that involve looking for information.
  

Concerns

• Students generally had difficulty relating their immediate background knowledge and experiences to broader situations and issues.
  
  
• Many students had difficulty evaluating ideas from a text, and expressing and justifying opinions.
  
  
• Many students were unfamiliar with different types of diagrams which are useful for summarising and recording information.

Looking Ahead
Students need help to develop research skills of:

• knowing and using a range of sources for gathering information for particular purposes.
  
  
• making judgements about the validity and suitability of information obtained.
  
  
• connecting information to wider issues and ideas.
  
  
• using different types of diagrams for summarising and recording information.
  
  
• forming and justifying opinions about information.
  

Good News

• While Social Studies ranked low among students’ subject preferences, they indicated positive attitudes nonetheless towards this learning area in the NEMP survey.
  
  
• Students were successful in identifying the issues leading to a school conflict situation.
  
  
• A large percentage of students were able to give at least some description of the sequence of events of a pöwhiri.
  
  
• High percentages of students were able to give some appropriate answers to aspects of tasks about leadership, identifying and responding to crises, recognising cultural icons, knowing about current events, and locations within Aotearoa New Zealand.

CONCERNS

• Students had difficulty connecting ideas to wider issues and identifying and discussing a range of possible ideas, opinions, behaviours and strategies.
  
  
• Most students were only able to give limited explanations of tikanga involved in a pöwhiri.
  
  
• Students had quite limited ideas about the important qualities of good leadership.
  
  
• The Resources and Economics Activities strand proved challenging for students.
  
  
• Although most students were able to describe and identify their own tribal origins, few had knowledge of tribes outside their own areas.

LOOKING AHEAD

• There is a need to help students know and talk about the underlying meanings of cultural practices and responsibilities.
  
  
• Students need opportunities
  that help them to have greater awareness, understanding and confidence in discussing significant events and issues at local, national and world-wide levels.

GOOD NEWS

• Most students performed well on tasks involving recall of basic addition and multiplication facts.
  
  
• A large percentage of students were competent in calculating the amount of change expected from money tendered for purchases.
  
  
• A large percentage of students have positive attitudes towards learning mathematics.
  
  
• Students rated mathematics as one of the top three most popular subjects.

CONCERNS

• Most students considered knowledge of basic facts and arithmetic skills as more important than thinking and problem solving skills.
  
  
• Many students had difficulty with mathematical tasks that involved reading and interpreting written information.
  
  
• Most students had difficulty across a broad range of mathematical skills and processes (number and algebra, measurement and geometry) when tasks progressed beyond very basic levels.
  
  
• Many students were able to calculate uncomplicated, single-step problems but had difficulty when problems involved more than one step of processing.

LOOKING AHEAD

• Results show that there is a need to expose students to meaningful and well chosen mathematical contexts and experiences that are embedded in language and discussion.
  
  
• Student learning in mathematics through te reo Mäori involves complexities of language structure. This has important implications for professional development of teachers and the continued creation of resources that are effective in supporting teaching and learning.
  

• All students in the national sample attended either Kura Kaupapa Mäori, Kura Mana Mäori, or full Mäori immersion schools. All students were at the year 8 level and had at least 4 years of Mäori medium education.
  
  
• Although students showed general proficiency in te reo Mäori in ordinary everyday conversation, academic competency in the language varied widely.
  
  
• A small number of the assessment tasks were developed from ideas put forward at a meeting of year 8 Mäori medium teachers. The balance of tasks were translated and adapted from NEMP English medium tasks. NEMP no longer compares Mäori students in general education with those in immersion education. This means that tasks could be contextualised or expressed in different ways as opposed to the direct translation approach of previous years.
  
  
• The tasks were administered by specially trained teachers with experience in Mäori medium teaching.
  
  
• Personnel from the participating schools were brought together to review and give feedback on the results and the proposed report.
  
  
• To help increase the usefulness of NEMP, the Ministry of Education is providing all Mäori medium schools with a pack containing a selection of tasks, materials and marking guides used in the assessment programme.
  
  
• As with all assessments that report overall scores, the fact that there are high performances by students in some schools is not readily apparent.
  
  
• The assessment results highlight a number of trends and issues that have the potential to inform the practice of teachers and schools, and priorities for the professional development of teachers.