• the very dedicated staff of the Educational Assessment Research Unit
• Stephen Porteners and other staff members of the Ministry of Education
• members of the Project’s National Advisory Committee
• members of the Project’s Technology Advisory Panel
• principals and children of the schools where tasks were trialled
• principals, staff and Board of Trustee members of the 254 schools included in the 2004 sample
• the 2876 children who participated in the assessments and their parents
• the 96 teachers who administered the assessments to the children
• the 48 senior tertiary students who assisted with the marking process
• the 195 teachers who assisted with the marking of tasks early in 2005.

New Zealand’s National Education Monitoring Project commenced in 1993, with the task of assessing and reporting on the achievement of New Zealand primary school children in all areas of the school curriculum. Children are assessed at two class levels: year 4 (halfway through primary education) and year 8 (at the end of primary education). Different curriculum areas and skills are assessed each year, over a four-year cycle. The main goal of national monitoring is to provide detailed information about what children can do so that patterns of performance can be recognised, successes celebrated, and desirable changes to educational practices and resources identified and implemented.

Each year, small random samples of children are selected nationally, then assessed in their own schools by teachers specially seconded and trained for this work. Task instructions are given orally by teachers, through video presentations, on laptop computers, or in writing. Many of the assessment tasks involve the children in the use of equipment and supplies. Their responses are presented orally, by demonstration, in writing, in computer files, or through submission of other physical products. Many of the responses are recorded on videotape for subsequent analysis.

The use of many tasks with both year 4 and year 8 students allows comparisons of the performance of year 4 and 8 students in 2004. Because some tasks have been used twice, in 2000 and again in 2004, trends in performance across the four-year period can also be analysed.

In 2004, the second year of the third cycle of national monitoring, three areas were assessed: music, aspects of technology, and reading and speaking. This report presents details and results of the assessments of aspects of technology. Technology is a creative, purposeful activity aimed at meeting needs and opportunities through the development of products, systems or environments. Knowledge, skills and resources are combined to help solve practical problems in particular social contexts.
A framework for technology education and its assessment is presented in Chapter 2. The framework highlights the three strands of the New Zealand technology curriculum:

• technological knowledge and understanding;
• technological capability;
• understanding and awareness of the relationship between technology and society.

Technology is a multidisciplinary activity. To attempt to represent all or even most of the areas, meanings and applications of technology within the national monitoring assessment programme would be unrealistic. After careful examination of the scope of the technology curriculum, it was decided to assess some key aspects, with a particular focus on the knowledge, understandings and skills listed above. Selected areas of content and broadly overlapping contexts (e.g. personal, home, school, community) have been used to investigate the ideas student have and the processes they can use.

When asked to indicate their perceptions of the frequency of nine different aspects of technological activity at school, year 4 students identified making things and designing things as the most common activities, followed by evaluating their ideas or designs, learning how to use tools and equipment, and changing things to improve them.

Since 1996, year 8 students have remained very positive about doing technology at school, with 92 or 93 percent choosing a positive rating in 1996, 2000 and 2004, and more than half choosing the most positive rating in both 2000 and 2004. A question in the 2004 Reading and Speaking Survey showed that technology was the second favourite subject among the 14 listed subjects for year 8 students (compared with tenth for year 4 students). Seventy percent of the year 8 students thought they learned “heaps” or “quite a lot” about technology at school, but 46 percent reported that they would like to learn more, and less than 50 percent believed that their class did really good things in technology “heaps” or “quite a lot”. Asked about how good they thought they were at tech-nology, 20 percent were very positive and 63 percent more mildly positive.

When asked to indicate their percep-tions of the frequency of nine different aspects of technological activity at school, year 8 students identified making things, learning how to use tools and equipment, and designing things as the most common activities, followed distantly by evaluating their ideas or designs and changing things to improve them.
In an open-ended question, students were asked what they thought technology was. Many year 4 students appeared unsure what technology was, with 46 percent of students not responding at all. About 60 percent of those responding (33 percent of those filling in the year 4 Technology Survey) associated technology with the use of hi-tech equipment and computers, with about half as many associating technology with designing and/or making things. A very different picture emerged with year 8 students. Over 80 percent of students responded to the question, with 38 percent identifying technology with hi-tech equipment and/or computers, 36 percent with designing and making things, and 32 percent with “workshop subjects”.

Chapter 7 reports the results of analyses that compared the task performance and survey responses of different demographic subgroups.
School type (full primary or intermediate), school size, community size and geographic zone did not seem to be important factors predicting achievement on the technology tasks. The same was true for the 2000 and 1996 assessments. However, there were statistically significant differences in the performance of students from low, medium and high decile schools on 63 percent of the tasks at year 4 level (compared to 86 percent in 2000 and 27 percent in 1996), and 72 percent of the tasks at year 8 level (compared to 48 percent in 2000 and 41 percent in 1996). The high percentage for year 8 in 2004 is from the same cohort of students associated with the high percentage at year 4 in 2000.

For the comparisons of boys with girls, Pakeha with Mäori, Pakeha with Pasifika students, and students for whom the predominant language at home was English with those for whom it was not, effect sizes were used.

Effect size is the difference in mean (average) performance of the two groups, divided by the pooled standard deviation of the scores on the particular task. For this summary, these effect sizes were averaged across all tasks.

Year 4 boys averaged negligibly higher than girls (mean effect size 0.01), but year 8 girls averaged slightly higher than boys (mean effect size 0.07). The corresponding figures in 2000 were 0.03 (boys higher) and 0.03 (boys higher).

Pakeha students averaged moderately higher than Mäori students, with mean effect sizes of 0.31 for year 4 students and 0.36 for year 8 students (the corresponding figures in 2000 were 0.38 and 0.38).

Pakeha students averaged sub-stantially higher than Pasifika students, with mean effect sizes of 0.41 for year 4 students and 0.45 for year 8 students (the corresponding figures in 2000 were 0.56 and 0.47).

Students for whom the predominant language at home was English averaged moderately higher than students from homes where other languages predominated, with mean effect sizes of 0.24 for year 4 students and 0.33 for year 8 students. Comparative figures are not available for the assessments four years earlier.