Technology is a creative, purposeful activity aimed at meeting needs and opportunities through the development of products, systems or environments. Knowledge, skills and resources are combined to help solve practical problems in particular social contexts.

Buzzer

Technology is a multi-disciplinary activity. To attempt to represent all or even most of the areas, meanings and applications of technology within the national monitoring assessment programme would be unrealistic. After careful examination of the scope of the technology curriculum, it was decided to assess some key aspects. Selected areas of content and broadly overlapping contexts (e.g. personal, home, school, community) were used to investigate the ideas student have and the processes they can use.

This chapter reports the results of seventeen technology tasks administered to individual Mäori students in both general education settings and Mäori immersion settings. The tasks address the three strands of the technology curriculum: technological knowledge and understanding, technological capability, and technology and society.

Eight tasks were administered in a videotaped one-to-one interview format and nine were attempted in a station or independent format (where students worked independently to develop a design, assemble a product, or record written responses to questions).

National monitoring results are reported task by task so that results can be understood in relation to what the students were asked to do. To allow comparisons of performance between the 2000 and 2004 assessments, however, five of the seventeen tasks have been designated link tasks. Student performance data on these tasks are presented in this report, but the tasks are described only in general terms because they will be used again in 2004.

Mäori students in general education and Mäori students in Mäori immersion settings performed equally well on nine tasks. Students in immersion programmes scored statistically significantly higher on two tasks and Mäori students in general education scored statistically significantly higher on six tasks. These comparisons must be interpreted with considerable caution, for the reasons discussed in Chapter 2.