Conceptual understanding is a central goal of mathematics education. Mathematics education is very much concerned with such matters as students’ confidence, interest and inventiveness in working with a range of

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mathematical ideas. It is aims to help students develop their capacity for exploring, applying and communicating their mathematical understandings within real-world contexts.

National monitoring assessments invite students to demonstrate their mathematical skills through a range of situations. These involve them in asking questions, making connections, and applying understandings and processes to novel as well as familiar situations. While confidence and efficiency in basic knowledge of facts is assessed, there is also a substantial focus on thinking, reasoning and problem-solving skills, requiring more open tasks that allow students to demonstrate their number sense, reason, make decisions and explain.

This chapter reports the results of sixty-three mathematics tasks administered to individual Mäori students in both general education settings and Mäori immersion settings. Twenty-three tasks were administered in a videotaped one-to-one interview format, while the other forty tasks were attempted in a station or independent format (students worked independently on the tasks, with teacher support available if required for reading and writing).

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 2001 and 2005 assessments, however, twenty-three of the sixty-three 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 2005.

Five of the tasks were judged not to be suitable for comparisons of the performance of Mäori students in general education and students in Mäori immersion settings. The reasons for these exclusions are presented in the commentaries accompanying the tasks.

Among the remaining fifty-eight tasks, Mäori students in general education and students in Mäori immersion settings performed equally well on thirty-four of the tasks. Mäori students in general education scored statistically significantly higher on twenty-four tasks. These differences occurred on 30 percent of the tasks in the Number strand, 42 percent of the tasks in the Measurement strand, and 52 percent of the tasks in the remaining strands (Geometry, Algebra and Statistics). All of these comparisons must be interpreted with considerable caution, for the reasons discussed in Chapter 2.