The national curriculum statement

Health is a state of physical, mental, social, emotional and spiritual well-being, and physical education is that part of education which promotes well-being through movement. Within the school curriculum health and physical education are strongly interrelated in their purpose of developing understandings, skills, attitudes and motivation to act in ways that benefit personal health and the health of others.

This area of learning enables students to learn about and develop confidence in themselves and their abilities, and to approach learning with energy and application. It helps them to take responsibility for their own health and physical fitness and to acknowledge their part in ensuring the well-being and safety of others.
(The New Zealand Curriculum Framework)

Aims of New Zealand’s Health and Physical Education Curriculum
The health and physical education curriculum for New Zealand students comprises four major aims and related areas of content concerned with personal health, motor skills, relationships with others, and healthy communities.

A. Personal health and physical development
The aim is that students develop the knowledge, understandings, skills and attitudes needed to maintain and enhance personal health and physical development.

The focus of learning is on personal health and physical development, and includes understandings about personal identity and self-worth. Students are expected to develop their abilities to meet their health and physical activity needs, now and in the future. They should learn about influences on their well-being and develop self-management skills that enhance their health. They are also encouraged to take increasing responsibility for the changing patterns in their life, work, relaxation and recreation.

B. Movement concepts and motor skills
The aim is that students develop motor skills through movement, acquire knowledge and understandings about movement, and develop positive attitudes towards physical activity.

The focus is on the development of personal movement skills appropriate to a range of situations and environments. Through participating in spontaneous play, informal games, cultural activities, creative movement, dance, sport and other forms of activity, students’ awareness of their personal identity is strengthened, they can experience satisfaction and develop an awareness and appreciation of the diverse nature of movement.

C. Relationships with other people
The aim is that students develop understandings, skills and attitudes that enhance interactions and relationships with other people.

Effective relationships in classrooms, schools, whanau and the wider community during play, recreation, sport, work and cultural activities are examined. Students are helped to consider how they themselves influence the well-being of other people and how the attitudes, values, actions and needs of other people influence them. They are helped to develop skills and attitudes that enable them to interact sensitively with other people, and to evaluate the impacts social and cultural factors have on relationships. They are also helped to know about effects of stereotyping and of discrimination against others on the basis of gender, age, ethnicity, economic background, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs or differing abilities.

D. Healthy communities and environments
The aim is that students participate in creating healthy communities and environments by taking responsible and critical action.

The focus is on the interdependence of students, their communities, society and the environment. Physical and social influences in the classroom, the school, the family and society that promote individual, group and community well-being are identified. Students are helped to understand their responsibilities to their communities and come to recognise the benefits that they can experience from participating as community members. They are encouraged to help develop healthy communities and environments by identifying inequities, making changes, and contributing positively through individual and collective action.

Frameworks for National Monitoring Assessment
National monitoring task frameworks are developed with the Project’s curriculum advisory panels. These frameworks have two key purposes. They provide a valuable guideline structure for the development and selection of tasks, and they bring into focus those important dimensions of learning which are arguably the basis for valid analyses of students’ skills, knowledge and understandings.

The assessment frameworks are organising tools that interrelate understandings with skills and processes. They are intended to be flexible and broad enough to encourage and allow the development of tasks that lead to meaningful descriptions of what students know and can do. They are also designed to help ensure a balanced representation of important learning outcomes.
The framework for health and physical education has a central organising theme supported by three major aspects: knowledge, skills and attitudes. The knowledge aspect is organised into three sections: personal, interacting with others and creating healthy communities. The skills aspect focuses on communicating and cooperating, problem-solving and decision-making, and moving. The attitudes aspect identifies important features related to motivation and involvement in health and physical education learning.

The most important message emerging from the use of the framework is the pervasive interrelatedness that exists across health and physical education knowledge, skills and attitudes. To regard each as a separate section of learning, whether for teaching or assessment purposes, assumes clear-cut boundaries that frequently do not exist. For purposes of reporting assessment information, tasks have been grouped according to the general structure of the health and physical education curriculum. This is reflected in the choice and arrangement of chapter headings in this report.

The Choice of Tasks for National Monitoring
The choice of tasks for national monitoring is guided by a number of educational and practical considerations. Uppermost in any decisions relating to the choice or administration of a task is the central consideration of validity and the effect that a whole range of decisions can have on this key attribute. Tasks are chosen because they provide a good representation of important knowledge and skills, but also because they meet a number of requirements to do with their administration and presentation. For example:

• Each task with its associated materials needs to be structured to ensure a high level of consistency in the way it is presented by specially-trained teacher administrators to students of wide-ranging backgrounds and abilities, and in diverse settings throughout New Zealand.

• Tasks need to span the expected range of capabilities of year 4 and 8 students and to allow the most able students to show the extent of their abilities while also giving the least able the opportunity to show what they can do.

• Materials for tasks need to be sufficiently portable, economical, safe and within the handling capabilities of students. Task materials also need to have meaning for students.

• The time needed for completing an individual task has to be balanced against the total time available for all of the assessment tasks, without denying students sufficient opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities.

• Each task needs to be capable of sustaining the attention and effort of students if they are to produce responses that truly indicate what they know and can do. Since neither the student nor the school receives immediate or specific feedback on performance, the motivational potential of the assessment is critical.

• Tasks need to avoid unnecessary bias on the grounds of gender, culture or social background while accepting that it is appropriate to have tasks that reflect the interests of particular groups within the community.

Health and Physical Education Assessment Tasks
Sixty-three health and physical education tasks were administered using four different approaches. Twenty-four were administered in one-to-one interview settings where students used materials and visual information, and responded orally. Six tasks were presented in team situations involving small groups of students working together. Ten tasks were attempted in a stations arrangement where students worked independently on a series of tasks and recorded their responses on paper. The remaining 23 tasks all involved open space physical activities which were attempted by students individually.

Fifty-three of the 63 tasks were the same or substantially the same for both year 4 and year 8. Another task followed the same procedures for year 4 and year 8 versions but excluded some of the task components for year 4 students. Three tasks were administered only to year 4 students and six tasks only to year 8 students.

Trend Tasks
Twenty-nine of the tasks were used previously in the 2002 health and physical education assessments. These were called link tasks in the 2002 report, but were not described in detail to avoid any distortions in the 2006 results that might have occurred if the tasks had been widely available for use in schools since 2002. In the current report, these tasks are called trend tasks, and are used to examine trends in student performance: whether they have improved, stayed constant or declined over the four-year period since the 2002 assessments.

Link Tasks
To allow similar comparisons between the 2006 and 2010 assessments, 28 of the tasks used for the first time in 2006 have been designated link tasks. Results of student performance on these tasks are presented in this report, but the tasks are described only in general terms because they will be used again in 2010.

Marking Methods
The students’ responses were assessed using specially designed marking procedures. The marking criteria used had been developed in advance by Project staff, but were sometimes modified as a result of issues raised during the marking. Tasks that required marker judgement and were common to year 4 and year 8 were intermingled during marking sessions, with the goal of ensuring that the same scoring standards and procedures were used for both. Similarly, where the marking of trend tasks required substantial marker judgement, specially selected representative samples of the 2002 performances were re-marked and intermingled with the 2006 performances. This helped to ensure that the trend information would be trustworthy and unaffected by changes in marking standards between 2002 and 2006.

Task-by-Task Reporting
National monitoring assessment is reported task by task so that results can be understood in relation to what the students were asked to do.

Access Tasks
Teachers and principals have expressed considerable interest in access to NEMP task materials and marking instructions, so that they can use them within their own schools. Some are interested in comparing the performance of their own students to national results on some aspects of the curriculum, while others want to use tasks as models of good practice. Some would like to modify tasks to suit their own purposes, while others want to follow the original procedures as closely as possible. There is obvious merit in making available carefully developed tasks that are seen to be highly valid and useful for assessing student learning.

Some of the tasks in this report cannot be made available in this way. Link tasks must be saved for use in four years’ time, and other tasks use copyright or expensive resources that cannot be duplicated by NEMP and provided economically to schools. There are also limitations on how precisely a school’s administration and marking of tasks can mirror the ways that they are administered and marked by the Project. Nevertheless, a substantial number of tasks are suitable to duplicate for teachers and schools. In this report, these access tasks are identified with the symbol above, and can be purchased in a kit from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (P.O. Box 3237, Wellington 6140, New Zealand).

How to read the tasks and results
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