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The assessments
included six tasks which offered the students opportunities to show their
skill in evaluating designs and design ideas.
Two of the six
tasks were identical for year 4 and year 8 students. Two more tasks (one
for year 4 students and the other for year 8 students) were very similar
and were marked using the same criteria and standards. The remaining
two tasks were used at one level only: one with year 4 students and the
other with year 8 students.
Two of the tasks
are link tasks (to be used again in the year 2000), and therefore are
not described in detail here. One of these tasks was used at both class
levels, the other only at year 4. The other four tasks are released tasks
for which full details are given.
This chapter presents
the assessment results in the following order: 
-
the released
task attempted by both year 4 and year 8 students
-
the pair
of similar released tasks, one attempted by year 4 students
and the other by year 8 students
-
the two link
tasks
Student performance
in evaluating designs and design ideas was not strong. On many task
components, less than a third of year 8 students performed at levels
variously rated as ''strong'', ''very high'', ''quite high'', ''full''
or ''quite full''. Averaged across all task components which were identical
or very similar for year 4 and year 8 students, 23 per cent of year
8 students performed at high or quite high levels, compared to 7 percent
of year 4 students. At the other end of the scale on these same task
components and average of 30 per cent of year 8 students performed
at low levels, compared to an average of 50 per cent of year 4 students.
Substantial progress between year 4 and year 8 is evident from these
figures.
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