The assessments included three tasks which related to the use of computers. These task sample some skills involved in using computers. Other computer skills will be sampled each year as part of the national monitoring programme, in a wide variety of curriculum areas. For instance, computer use will be included in the 1997 assessments of mathematics, information skills and social studies.

All three tasks were administered to both year 4 and year 8 students. The first two tasks presented here are released tasks, for which full details are given. The third task is a link task (to be used again in the year 2000), and therefore is not described in detail here).

The results show that most Year 4 and year 8 students were able to use the computers effectively to complete simple tasks. It should be noted that this result was obtained after students completed an exercise which allowed them to practise standard procedures required to use the Macintosh Powerbook computers. The success rate was consistently higher for year 8 students than for year 4 students, but not by a large margin.