Clown show

The assessments included six tasks that allowed students to show their skills in clarifying information needs through deciding what focus was required and in some cases what specific information was needed. This often included asking students to identify or generate appropriate questions to help obtain required information.

Four tasks were identical for both year 4 and year 8, one was attempted only by year 4 students, and another was attempted only by year 8 students. Two are trend tasks (fully described with data for both 1997 and 2001), one is a released task (fully described with data for 2001 only), and three are link tasks (to be used again in 2005, so only partially described here).

The tasks are presented in the following order:

• trend tasks (attempted by both year 4 and year 8 students)
• the released task (attempted by both year 4 and year 8 students)
• link tasks attempted by both year 4 and year 8 students
• link tasks attempted by year 4 or year 8 students

Year 8 students enjoyed substantially more success than year 4 students. Averaged across 15 task components attempted by both years, 23 percent more year 8 than year 4 students succeeded well
with these components. On most components, 60 to 80 percent of year 8 students performed quite
strongly, compared to 35 to 55 percent of year 4 students.

There was little evidence of change between 1997 and 2001. Averaged across 9 task components attempted by year 4 students in both years, 1 percent fewer students succeeded in 2001 than in 1997. At year 8 level, again with 9 components included, 3 percent fewer students succeeded in 2001 than in 1997. These differences are too small to be regarded as important.