OVERVIEW

Students were fairly successful on tasks requiring finding and gathering information, particularly where the tasks called for locating information that was clearly indicated as desired. Where it was necessary to go in depth to find information, or where some level of inference was needed to find information, year 4 students struggled somewhat, and performance at year 8 was much better. Very small gains were observed from the 2005 to the 2009 administrations.

The assessments related to finding and gathering information included 16 tasks that explored how well the students could find and gather information. Specifically, the tasks explored students’ knowledge and skills relating to:

• the organisation of libraries, reference books and other books;
• the types of information available from different sources;
• finding particular information in books, pamphlets, diagrams, video recordings and simulations of the internet;
• extracting and recording relevant information.

Year 8 students were generally more successful at finding and gathering information than year 4 students, particularly on tasks that required going in depth to find information, inferring what was needed, or coming up with more than one way to acquire information. This can be seen in particular on Everyday Detective and Zoo Trip. On tasks that required a more straightforward identification of information, differences between year 4 and year 8 students were smaller.

Five tasks were identical for both year 4 and 8 students; four were very similar for year 4 and year 8 students but truncated for year 4 students; one was attempted only by year 4 students; and seven were attempted only by year 8 students. Ten are trend tasks (fully described with data for both 2005 and 2009); one is a released task (fully described with data for 2009 only); and six are link tasks (to be used again in a later administration and so only partially described here). On 67 task components that year 4 and year 8 students had in common, year 8 students were successful 14% more of the time on average. Gains from the 2005 administration to the 2009 administration were very small, with 1% more students being successful in 2009 for both years.

The tasks are presented here in the following order:

• trend tasks attempted by year 4 and year 8 students;
• trend tasks attempted by only year 4 or year 8 students;
• a released task attempted by only year 8 students;
• link tasks attempted by year 4 and year 8 students;
• a link task attempted by only year 8 students.