OVERVIEW

In the area of thinking about and using information, students showed good ability at taking information and making basic uses out of it, but did less well in using it in more sophisticated ways. In particular, using information to help support an argument they were making was challenging for students. There was strong growth from year 4 to year 8 and little change from the 2005 assessments.

The assessments included 18 tasks that explored how well students could think about and use information. These 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.

Students, particularly at year 8, are able to take information that is presented to them and make basic, fundamental uses of that information (see, for example, Sushi ). Children are less able to use that information to form general opinions or support arguments that they wish to make (see for example, Shoes ). Generally speaking, there is moderate growth in thinking about and using information from year 4 to year 8. Averaged across 78 task components, year 8 students performed 11% better than year 4 students. There was little change in performance from the previous administration in 2005: a 2% decline for year 8 students (based on 59 task components) and no change for year 4 students (based on 37 task components).

Twelve of the tasks were identical for both year 4 and year 8 students in the 2009 administration. Six tasks were attempted only by year 8 students. Seven tasks are trend tasks, containing full information for the 2005 and 2009 administration; two are released tasks with information only for 2009, and nine are linked tasks to be used at a later administration and only partially described here.

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 8 students;
• released tasks attempted by only year 8 students;
• link tasks attempted by year 4 and year 8 students;
• link tasks attempted by only year 8 students.