The focus of this chapter is on functional writing. Students were asked to present information clearly and accurately in written form. They acted as reporters, gave instructions, prepared advertisements, wrote party invitations, left notes, filled in forms, and wrote letters, faxes and e-mail messages.

The results for seventeen tasks are reported here. Eleven of these were identical for both year 4 and year 8. Two tasks were administered only to year 4 students, and four tasks were administered only to year 8 students. Eleven tasks were administered using the stations approach, two using the one to one approach, and three using the independent approach.

Five of the tasks have been selected as link tasks (to be used again in the year 2002) and therefore are not described in detail here. Four of these link tasks were attempted by both year 4 and year 8 students, while the fifth was a computer-based task attempted only by year 8 students. The other twelve tasks are released tasks for which full details are given.

The tasks are presented in the following order:

Considering the eleven tasks which allowed comparisons of the performance of year 4 and year 8 students, on average 32 percent more year 8 students than year 4 students gained high scores. The margin of superiority ranged from 25 percent of students on one task to 44 percent of students on another. These margins are among the largest recorded in four years of national monitoring, perhaps reflecting the greater opportunities year 8 students have had to practice the writing conventions associated with many of these tasks.