First Reading And Maths Achievement Findings Released From Curriculum Insights Study

New reporting from the Curriculum Insights and Progress Study has indicated how students are progressing in reading and maths.

Curriculum Insights, an update on the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA), has assessed a nationally representative sample of students at Years 3, 6 and 8 from English-medium state and state-integrated schools in reading and maths. The assessments were carried out in Term 4, 2023.

The results have been provisionally benchmarked against a 2023 draft version of a new curriculum statement in mathematics. This indicated that:

• In maths, 22% of students at Year 8 were meeting curriculum expectations. This figure was 28% at Year 6, and 20% at Year 3.
• In reading, 47% of students at Year 8 were meeting curriculum expectations. This figure was 52% at Year 6, and 54% at Year 3.

Trend data from this study and NMSSA indicates that at Year 8, there has been no statistically significant change in mathematics achievement scores since at least 2013. On average, students scored about the same in 2013, 2018, 2022, and 2023.

The curriculum benchmarking indicated that a smaller proportion of students were meeting the Year 8 expectation for the draft curriculum statement compared with the previous 2007 curriculum (22 percent against the new compared with 42 percent against the old).

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“What we’re seeing in mathematics is a change in curriculum and a new benchmarking process rather than a change in achievement,” notes one of the study leads, Dr Charles Darr.

“We’ve been tracking student achievement in mathematics at Year 8 for more than 10 years, and in that time, there has been no evidence for improvement or decline. We do have a new draft curriculum however, and the provisional benchmarking exercise we carried out indicates it requires a higher level of proficiency than the 2007 curriculum.”

These findings are available in full at the Curriculum Insights website:

• An interactive data window provides more detailed student achievement information, broken down by demographic subgroups.
• Dashboard reports for reading and maths provide a succinct overview of achievement at Year 3, Year 6, or Year 8. These include information about the assessments, the students and schools who took part, what the curriculum expects, students' strengths and opportunities for growth, and change over time.

The findings are also available on the Education Counts site.

About the Curriculum Insights and Progress Study

Curriculum Insights is an update on the long-standing National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement. It is based on a representative sample of schools, and is designed specifically to understand student progress and achievement within the updated New Zealand Curriculum and how teaching practice – and the education sector more widely – can evolve to support continued progress.

Curriculum Insights is a collaboration between Otago University’s Educational Assessment Research Unit and the New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

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