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The assessments
included eleven tasks which asked the students to analyse and use information.
The skills involved included interpreting individual pieces of information,
analysing and collating information from more than one source, understanding
and describing the structure of a collection of information, and reporting
findings.
Three tasks were identical for year 4 and year 8, two were attempted
only by year 4 students, and six were attempted only by year 8 students.
Both of the tasks attempted only by year 4 students had a closely related
task among the year 8 tasks. Because this area was not extensively covered
in the 1997 assessments, there were no trend tasks (tasks from 1997
used unchanged in 2001). There are seven released tasks (used for the
first time in 2001 and fully described in this report) and four link
tasks (tasks to be used again in 2005, so only partially described here).
The released tasks are presented first, followed by the link tasks.
Within each of these two sections, tasks attempted by both years and
parallel tasks (where year 4 and year 8 students attempted similar tasks)
are presented first, followed by tasks attempted only by year 4 students
and finally tasks attempted only by year 8 students.
Year 8 students enjoyed substantially more success than year 4 students
on two of the three task attempted by both years, with little difference
on Stop - Look - Think. Averaged across the 17 task components of the
three tasks, 12 percent more year 8 than year 4 students succeeded well
with these components. Where the analysis required involved higher levels
of inference, both year 4 and year 8 students performed much less well
than where less judgement was required.
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