: Introduction

Twenty-five of the assessment tasks presented students with completed graphs, tables or maps and asked them to extract and interpret particular information.

Thirteen of these tasks were completely or largely the same for year 4 and year 8 students. Of these thirteen tasks, four tasks are link tasks (to be used again in 1999), and nine are released tasks (fully described here). Nine other tasks, including four link tasks, were attempted only by year 8 students. The remaining three tasks, including two link tasks, were attempted only by year 4 students.

The tasks were presented to students in two formats. Tasks which involved more complex instructions or required more extended responses were administered in the one-to-one interview format, with each student working individually with a teacher and their interactions videotaped. The remaining tasks were presented in the stations format, where four students worked around a series of task stations, supervised and assisted where appropriate by a teacher.

Presentation This Chapter presents the assessment results in the following order:

Each released task occupies one or more pages. The information provided includes the graph, table or map to be interpreted, the task instructions and questions, correct answers, and a table showing the percentages of students getting each question or task component correct. Some tasks also include a brief commentary on interesting features of the results.

Each link task occupies one quarter of a page. A broad indication is given of the nature of the task, and a table is provided showing the percentages of students getting each question or task component correct.

Results Averaged across all questions given to both year 4 and year 8 students, 86 percent of year 8 students produced correct responses, compared to 62 percent of year 4 students.

More than half of these questions were answered successfully by at least 90 percent of year 8 students. This indicates that, on average, students have progressed substantially between year 4 and year 8 in the skills assessed by the tasks.

Questions which required students to find and compare two items of information were particularly challenging for students at both levels, with low percentages of the year 4 students succeeding with these questions.

It is reassuring to note that some of the larger performance differences between year 4 and year 8 students occurred with questions involving formats or techniques which are generally not taught until after year 4 (such as pie graphs or line graphs).