Creating Music
 : Introduction 1996   
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The assessments included six assessment tasks related to creating music.

Two of the tasks were identical for year 4 and year 8 students. The other four tasks were in effect two pairs of tasks. Each pair had identical instructions, marking procedures, and marking criteria, but differed in stimulus material. One of these pairs had su fficiently similar stimulus material to be presented as two minor variants of one task. The other pair had substantial differences in stimulus material, and is presented as two separate tasks.

Two of the tasks are link tasks (to be used again in the year 2000), and are therefore not described in detail here. The other tasks are released tasks for which full details are given.

This chapter presents the assessment results in the following order:

the released task pair attempted by both year 4 and year 8 students

• the released task attempted only by year 4 students

• the released task attempted only by year 8 students

• the two tasks which will be used as link tasks, both of which were identical for year 4 and year 8 students

Where tasks were identical or nearly identical for year 4 and year 8 students, the success rate among year 8 students was higher than the success rate for year 4 students, but generally not by a large margin. Results for the second link task indicate that the margin is greater where use of musical instruments was required, suggesting greater control of instruments by the older students.

One possible interpretation of the moderate performance level shown here is that many students may have little opportunity in school music programmes to create music, with programmes concentrating more on other strands of the music curriculum.

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