Attitudes and Motivation
The national monitoring assessment programme recognizes the impact of attitudinal and motivational factors on student achievement in individual assessment tasks. Students’ attitudes, interests and liking for a subject have a strong bearing on progress and learning outcomes. Students are influenced and shaped by the quality and style of curriculum delivery, the choice of content and the suitability of resources. Other important factors influencing students’ achievements are the expectations and support of significant people in their lives, the opportunities and experiences they have in and out of school, and the extent to which they have feelings of personal success and capability.

Health and Physical Education Surveys
The national monitoring health and physical education surveys sought information from students about their curriculum preferences and their perceptions of their achievement. Students were also asked about their involvement in health and physical education activities within school and beyond. The surveys were administered to both year 4 and year 8 students in groups of four students, with most questions requiring short written answers and others a written response. Teacher help with reading or writing was provided where requested.

There are numerous research questions that could be asked when investigating student attitudes and engagement. In national monitoring it has been necessary to focus on a few key questions that give an overall impression of how students view health and physical education as school, home and community activities.

The health survey included an item which asked students to indicate preferred subjects at school, an item which asked them to indicate preferred and disliked health activities at school, four items which invited students to record a rating response, and one item which sought open-ended responses (and is not reported here).

The students were first asked to select their three favourite school subjects from a list of twelve subjects. The results are shown in the table adjacent, together with the corresponding 1998 figures. Physical education was the most popular option for year 8 students and the second most popular option for year 4 students. Health was last equal at both year levels.

Many of the activities were viewed quite differently by year 4 and year 8 students. For instance, How to care for others and Families were popular with year 4 students, but much less popular with year 8 students. On the other hand, Food and healthy eating, How to keep healthy, and How to keep safe were distinctly more popular with year 8 than year 4 students. Both year levels agreed that activities about Friendships were particularly liked, while My feelings and how to feel good about myself was more disliked than liked.

Responses to the four rating items are presented in separate tables for year 4 students and year 8 students below. Between 1998 and 2002, the percentage of year 4 students awarding the highest rating on each of the first three questions has declined markedly. Both year 4 and year 8 students continue to be very positive about the usefulness of learning about health (question 2), despite the slippage for year 4 students. The responses to question 4 indicated that only 39 percent of year 4 students and 33 percent of year 8 students believed their class did things that helped them learn about health “lots” or “quite a lot”. These figures were essentially unchanged between 1998 and 2002. As found in NEMP surveys for most other curriculum areas, a substantially lower percentage of year 8 students than year 4 students gave the highest ratings to learning about health in school, currently and in the future (questions 1 and 3), often preferring the second most positive response.

The physical education survey included one item that invited students to indicate preferred physical education activities at school, another that asked about preferences for different approaches to physical education activities, and nine items that invited them to record a rating response. There were also seven items that asked them to write open-ended responses. Only some of the open-ended items are analysed and reported here.