NMSSA 2021: The Arts - Key Findings Publications
Publication Details
The National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) is a national sampling study designed to assess student achievement across the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) at Year 4 and Year 8 in English-medium state and state integrated schools. The study is organised in five-year cycles. The first cycle ran from 2012 to 2016 and the second from 2017 to 2021. As part of the 2021 study, NMSSA monitored achievement in the arts learning area and also collected contextual data using questionnaires for students, teachers and principals. The previous NMSSA study involving the arts learning area was in 2015.
This report is designed to provide a succinct overview of key findings for the arts learning area from the 2021 study. Supporting documents include a report focused on curriculum insights for teachers, a technical report, and an online interactive statistical application. All reports and the interactive application can be found on the NMSSA website.
Author(s): Educational Assessment Research Unit and New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
Date Published: November 2022
Executive Summary
The arts
The NZC describes the arts as one learning area, which comprises four disciplines: dance, drama, music and the visual arts. Each discipline has its own distinctive body of knowledge, concepts and modes of enquiry, and its own forms or genres, styles, conventions and processes. The NZC requires that students at Year 4 and Year 8 have access to learning in each of the arts disciplines. Each arts discipline is organised with four common strands in the curriculum, and for students to make progress, they must demonstrate specific discipline-related knowledge and skills. The four common strands are: understanding the arts in context, developing practical knowledge in the arts, developing ideas in the arts, and communicating and interpreting in the arts. How the strands are incorporated in the learning process varies across disciplines and in emphasis across year levels.
The NMSSA assessment programme sought to assess student achievement in the arts (covering the four disciplines and across the strands) to gain a national picture of student achievement at Year 4 and Year 8.
Interruption to the 2021 study
The 2021 NMSSA assessment programme was interrupted by a nationwide lockdown associated with COVID-19 that occurred midway through data collection in Term 3. This resulted in the entire programme being suspended for two-and-a-half weeks. When the lockdown was over, NMSSA implemented a shortened programme in the schools that had not yet been visited and were still able to be involved. This did not include schools in Auckland where the lockdown continued. The interruption meant that the national sample for 2021 is made up of fewer students from a smaller number of schools than originally intended. In total, 1,015 students at Year 4 and 1,053 students at Year 8 were involved in the study. The students represented 61 schools at Year 4 and 64 schools at Year 8. This compares with the original intention to sample about 2,200 students from 100 schools at Year 4 and 100 schools at Year 8. The interruption to the programme means that care should be taken when interpreting results, especially for smaller groups in the sample. NMSSA has chosen to limit some aspects of the reporting when numbers are low. For example, while the reporting does provide results for Pacific students in the samples, these are not used to draw inferences at a national level or to make comparisons with other groups.
It is also important to consider the more general impact of the COVID 19 pandemic when interpreting the results from the 2021 NMSSA study. In the 18 months leading up to the study, schools, students and whānau had to cope with a considerable amount of disruption, including extended periods of remote learning. Over this time, schools had to prioritise how they used time and put more effort into maintaining student wellbeing and providing pastoral care. Although NMSSA cannot directly quantify any learning losses associated with disruptions caused by COVID-19, it is likely that they have had at least some negative impacts.
Key findings
Achievement in the arts
NMSSA assessed achievement in the arts using the Nature of the Arts (NoTA) assessment in 2021. The NoTA assessment included tasks associated with all four arts disciplines and primarily emphasised aspects of three strands of the curriculum: understanding the arts in context; developing practical knowledge in the arts; and interpreting in the arts. The fourth strand (developing ideas in the arts) was assessed for visual arts in NoTA. The NoTA assessment presented many of the tasks on computer and included a mixture of selected-response and short open-ended response questions. Students wrote their answers to the short-response questions in a booklet.
The use of common assessment items in the NoTA assessments for 2015 and 2021 meant that student achievement recorded on the 2021 assessment could be located and compared with achievement recorded in 2015. It also allowed achievement to be reported against the same curriculum expectation scores used in 2015. These were set as part of a curriculum alignment exercise associated with the 2015 assessment.
The difference between the average scores for Year 4 and Year 8 students on the 2021 NoTA assessment was 37 NoTA scale score units. This indicates that, on average, students make about 9 scale score units of ‘progress’ per year, between the two year levels and represents an annualised effect size of 0.42. This difference is consistent with findings from 2015.
Girls scored higher, on average, than boys on the NoTA assessment at both year levels. The difference between the average scores for boys and girls was 10 scale score units at both Year 4 and Year 8. Achievement varied within and across ethnic groups. Each ethnic group was made up of high and low achievers and, on average, the learners in each group made similar levels of ‘progress’ between Year 4 and Year 8. Ākonga Māori scored lower, on average, than non-Māori students on the NoTA assessment by 13 scale score units at Year 4 and 11 units at Year 8. It is important to note that greater proportions of ākonga Māori, compared with non-Māori learners, attended lower decile schools. At both Year 4 and Year 8, students attending high decile schools scored higher, on average than students who attended mid and low decile schools. The difference at Year 4 between students attending high and low deciles schools was 21 scale score units. At Year 8, it was 15 units.
In 2021, the average NoTA score at both Year 4 and Year 8 was 6 NoTA scale units lower than in 2015. This decline in the average score was evident across all subgroups.
Contextual factors associated with learning in the arts: attitudes, opportunities, resources
Up to 400 students at each year level completed a computer-based questionnaire about each of the arts disciplines: up to 18 students in each school. Up to four teachers in each school completed a teacher questionnaire, with both classroom teachers and specialist arts teachers invited to participate. In total, 125 Year 4 teachers and 166 Year 8 teachers responded. Principals from 54 schools participating at Year 4 and 50 from schools participating at Year 8 completed a principal questionnaire.
From students
In the ‘About You’ section of the questionnaire, students were asked how often they spoke English at home. This information is provided to give readers insight into the nature of the sample. Sixty-nine percent of Year 4 students and 80 percent of Year 8 students reported they ‘always’ spoke English at home. A further 17 percent at Year 4 and 15 percent at Year 8 reported they ‘often’ spoke English at home.
Overall, students were positive about their learning in each of the arts disciplines. In general, and as also found in the NMSSA 2015 study, students in Year 4 were more positive than those in Year 8. Ākonga Māori showed similar levels of enthusiasm for each of the arts disciplines, compared with non-Māori students, and girls were generally more positive about each of the arts disciplines than boys.
Most students in both year groups agreed at least ‘a little’ they were good at each of the arts disciplines. They were most likely to agree that they were good at visual arts compared with the other arts disciplines. Year 4 students were least likely to agree that they were good at drama and Year 8 students were least likely to agree that they were good at dance.
Students were asked how often they had opportunities to engage in a range of learning activities associated with each discipline at school. Higher percentages of students at both year levels reported opportunities to draw and paint in the visual arts than for any other opportunities across the arts disciplines. On average, and as observed in the NMSSA 2015 study, boys indicated less involvement than girls in the listed opportunities.
Students were also asked to indicate how often they participated in a range of opportunities to learn about each of the arts disciplines outside of school. Overall, girls were more likely than boys to indicate that they participated in formal learning activities related to the arts outside of school. Girls were also more likely than boys to indicate that they involved themselves in performance activities by themselves or with others in the arts. Once again, these findings were consistent with those reported in 2015.
From teachers
When asked about student opportunities to engage in each of the learning opportunities, Year 4 and Year 8 teachers showed very similar response patterns. There were very few instances where one quarter or more of teachers reported that their students engaged in a learning opportunity ‘very often’. In dance, there were no examples of this.
Teachers were asked how many hours in total their classes spent learning each of the arts disciplines across the year. At both year levels, responses varied within and across the disciplines. Teachers reported that more time was spent in activities related to visual arts than to dance, drama or music.
A small proportion of teachers indicated that they had taken part in professional learning and development (PLD) in the arts disciplines over the past five years. This was most evident for dance and drama, where the proportions of teachers indicating that the last time they had received PLD was ‘more than 5 years ago’ or ‘never’ was close to 80 percent at each year level. In the 2015 NMSSA study, teachers were asked if they had received PLD in the arts disciplines in the past 12 months, at that time, less than a third indicated that they had.
As also observed in the 2015 NMSSA study, the proportion of teachers who agreed that they were confident about teaching visual arts was greater than for any of the other arts disciplines. Around 40 percent of teachers disagreed that they were confident teaching and assessing dance and music.
Nearly all teachers agreed that it was important to teach each of the arts disciplines. At both year levels, teachers were more likely to respond with ‘strongly agree’ when rating the importance of teaching visual arts than the other arts disciplines.
From principals
At both Year 4 and Year 8, close to half of principals reported that there had been no developmental focus in the arts in the past five years and rated dance, drama and music as having relatively low priority in comparison with other learning areas. Principals tended to give a higher priority rating to the visual arts; although, relatively few principals at each year level rated it as a high priority. The principals in the 2021 study were less likely than those from the 2015 study to indicate any of the arts disciplines were a priority.
Principals indicated that specialist teachers were more likely to contribute to the teaching of the arts disciplines at Year 8, whereas, at Year 4, each of the arts disciplines was more likely to be taught by a classroom teacher with little or no added support. At Year 8, principals reported that specialists taught all or nearly all the music programmes in over one half of their schools, and all or nearly all the visual arts programmes in just under one half of their schools. Dance and drama were taught by, or mainly by, specialists in over one third of schools at Year 8. These findings are similar to those reported in 2015.
Many principals noted limited access to comprehensive professional development across the arts disciplines. They were, however, generally more positive about access to programmes associated with the visual arts compared with dance, drama and music. These findings were consistent with those reported in 2015
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