The Wolf

The assessments included nineteen tasks which asked the students to view visual resources (some of which were accompanied by words or a soundtrack) and to demonstrate understanding of the messages conveyed, their purposes, the contexts in which they were appropriate, or the particular techniques used. Visual material is a prominent part of life in our world. It takes many forms, such as illustrations in books, photographs, comics and cartoons, posters, brochures, advertisements, films and television programmes. Students need to learn to make sense of this material, and to become discriminating users of it.

Fourteen tasks were identical for both year 4 and year 8 students, and one had some overlapping components for year 4 and 8 students but additional components for year 8 students only. One task was administered only to year 4 students, and three only to year 8 students. Six are trend tasks (fully described with data for both 1998 and 2002), five are released tasks (fully described with data for 2002 only), and eight are link tasks (to be used again in 2006, so only partially described here).

The tasks are presented in the three sections: trend tasks, then released tasks and finally link tasks. Within each section, tasks administered to both year 4 and year 8 students are presented first, followed by tasks administered only to year 4 students and then tasks administered only to year 8 students.

Averaged across 129 task components administered to both year 4 and year 8 students, 9 percent more year 8 than year 4 students succeeded with these components. Year 8 students performed better on 110 of the 129 components. The components with the largest differences generally involved judgement or inference, rather than observation and reporting.

The trend analyses showed small gains since 1998. Averaged across 21 task components attempted by year 4 students in both years, 2 percent more students succeeded in 2002 than in 1998, with gains on 12 components and losses on 7 components. These gains are not large enough to be regarded as significant. At year 8 level, with 29 task components included in the analysis, 3 percent more students succeeded in 2002 than in 1998, with gains on 21 components and losses on 8 components. Overall, this suggests a modest gain for year 8 students over the four-year period.

Both year 4 and year 8 students often achieved quite high performance levels on task components that involved observing, recalling and using specific factual information. Predictably, they were less successful where the task components involved interpretation or evaluation of visual messages, or of the intentions of the designers of those messages. These latter components usually were handled substantially better by year 8 than year 4 students.