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The assessments
included 22 tasks that involved students in silent reading to obtain
information, answer questions and make decisions.
Sixteen of the tasks were identical for year 4 and year 8 students.
The remaining six tasks were given only to year 8 students.
Four tasks are trend tasks (fully described with data for both 2000
and 2004), eight are released tasks (fully described with data for 2004
only) and 10 are link tasks (to be used again in 2008, so only partially
described here). The tasks are presented in that order, with tasks for
year 8 students only following tasks for students at both levels.
When results for year 4 and year 8 students in 2004 are compared, it
is clear that year 8 students demonstrated consistently higher levels
of reading comprehension than year 4 students. Averaged across 147 components
of 16 tasks, 21 percent more year 8 than year 4 students succeeded with
the components. Year 8 students scored higher on all except one
component. The margin
was greatest for two tasks involving scanning for information under
a time constraint (Toyworld and Link Task 11), for which the margins
were 28 and 39 percent. As was the case in the 2000 assessments, many
of the students did not appear to be very efficient at scanning for
information.
Four years ago, we reported similar trends in performance on comprehension
tasks to those found on oral reading tasks: very substantial gains between
1996 and 2000 at year 4 level and small gains at year 8 level. This
time, the trends for oral reading (Chapter 3) and comprehension (this
chapter) do not match. Averaged across 27 components of three trend
tasks in this chapter, year 4 students performed at the same level in
2004 as in 2000. For year 8 students, with 31 components of four trend
tasks included, on average three percent fewer students succeeded with
task components in 2004 than in 2000 – a small decline.
It is not clear why the trends in Chapter 3 (continued improvement at
both levels) and this chapter (no change at year 4 and a small decline
at year 8) do not match. One possibility is that schools have been giving
greater focus to improving oral reading than to improving comprehension.
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