Summary

Along with children from over 60 countries, New Zealand’s Year 5 students took part in the 2010/11 cycle of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2010/11). This study measures trends in mathematics and science achievement in Years 5 and 9 and identifies effective instructional practices from around the world. After every cycle of TIMSS some of the test questions are released to the public, while some are kept confidential to help measure trends from one cycle to the next.

This booklet contains a selection of TIMSS 2010/11 test questions from the three science content domains. It includes examples of questions where New Zealand Year 5 students did better than the international average and examples where they did worse. For those questions where New Zealand students struggled, suggested resources are provided for use in the classroom for teaching the topics these questions relate to. This booklet is intended as a resource for Year 5 science teachers.

The TIMSS content and cognitive domains

The assessment in TIMSS is organised around a content domain and a cognitive domain. Details of these domains are published in the TIMSS 2011 assessment frameworks (Mullis et al., 2009). The content domain for Year 5 (Grade 4) science has three areas: life science, physical science, and Earth science. The life science content area is similar to the living world strand in the New Zealand Science Curriculum, and the Earth science area is similar to the planet Earth and beyond strand. The physical science area encompasses both the material world and physical world strands of the New Zealand Curriculum.

The cognitive domain for science is made up of three areas that describe the thinking processes students must use as they engage with the content: knowing, applying, and reasoning.

In the content domain, New Zealand Year 5 students did relatively better at Earth science and life science questions and worse at physical science questions in 2010/11. In the cognitive areas, our students scored similarly across the three.

The questions (and accompanying score points) in the TIMSS test were not evenly distributed across all content and cognitive areas. The distribution reflects the content and cognitive emphasis of the curricula of the participating countries. In the science content areas at Year 5, the most emphasis was on life science, followed by physical science, then Earth science.

Time spent on content and cognitive areas in New Zealand classrooms

On average, New Zealand Year 5 teachers indicated that they spent 41 percent of their science teaching time in the school year on life science (including environmental issues). Twenty-eight percent was spent on physical science (includes topics in physics and chemistry) and twenty-eight percent on Earth science (including Earth and the solar system). On average, three percent of teachers’ time was spent on general topics other than those three.

According to teachers, the cognitive emphasis in their lessons was on getting students to give explanations about something they are studying (57% in about half the lessons or more often) and relating what they are learning in science to their daily lives (also 57% in about half the lessons or more often), rather than on memorising facts and principles (4% in half the lessons or more often).

Test curriculum matching analysis

When developing TIMSS 2010/11, every effort was made to ensure the widest possible coverage of the mathematics and science curricula in each country. However, inevitably the TIMSS 2010/11 tests were not a perfect match for every curriculum, and so some questions fell outside the scope of what the children had covered in class. To address this issue, each country was asked to indicate which questions on the tests were inappropriate for their curriculum. Those questions in which New Zealand students did worse than the international average and were mismatches for the New Zealand curriculum have not been included in this booklet.

How is the information in this booklet presented?

Each question in the three science contents areas gives the question, label and item number, the content and cognitive domain it relates to, the expected answer (and in some cases typical wrong answers), and a table with a selection of countries’ results for comparison. This table shows the percentage of students who correctly answered the question and achieved the maximum number of points. The number/s of the released booklets in which the questions can be found are also mentioned in the table.

Benchmarks

The TIMSS benchmarks describe what students can typically do at set points on the science scale: low (400), intermediate (475), high (550), and advanced (625). Each test question is categorised as being ‘anchored’ at one of these benchmarks. This benchmark anchor level is given in the text above each question and gives an indication of the difficulty of the question.  More information about the benchmarks can be found in Martin et al. (2012).