Understanding about science resources

Task: Students use recent information obtained from space exploration to show how and why beliefs have changed over time. Assessment focus: interpreting information about the provisional nature of science.

Task: Select which stirrer would feel hottest and explain why, and in which container soup would cool fastest, and explain why. Assessment focus: heat conduction.

Task: Students classify each of six drawn whales as either toothed or baleen whales. They then divide each group further by using a key. Assessment focus: Interpreting representations.

Task: Read a short piece of narrative. Identify and explain the behavioural adaptations of oystercatchers. Assessment focus: interpreting text to identify behavioural adaptations and their purposes.

Students use stimulus material to answer a number of questions relating to temperature change in materials which are at different distances from a heat source.

Students are provided with a map showing wind speed and direction over some landforms. Students explain two ways that mountains affect the wind.

Answer questions about rubbish picked up on a beach, and suggest reasons why plastic is the most common rubbish.

Task: Students answer questions about feeding relationships in a rocky shore ecosystem. Assessment focus: interpreting a food web.

Students use a diagram that shows a food web to answer five questions about the information within the food web.

Task: Students draw a labelled diagram of a plant indicating how it gets its energy. Assessment focus: photosynthesis.

In this task, students look for patterns in electron arrangement in the periodic table. They use their ideas to place missing elements in the table, answer some questions about the patterns, and use the patterns to predict the properties of some elements.

Choose which toy vehicle will roll further, and explain why. The two vehicles are set up under different conditions (ramps at different slopes, rolling onto different surfaces at the bottom). Assessment focus: science explanations using ideas about forces and energy.

Task: read an article about releasing hand-reared kaka into a safe environment and answer questions about the research. Assessment focus: field investigations.

Task: Students match parts of statements about how Joan Wiffen worked like a scientist, and identify what skills or experiences helped her find fossils. Assessment focus: interpreting information about how scientists work.

For this practical students observe some activities which illustrate melting and dissolving. They write sentences about what they observe and then write what they think melting and dissolving mean.

Students complete a table for six common objects by stating the material used to make each object and a useful property of that material.

For this practical students use provided definitions to classify 12 objects as either transparent, translucent, or opaque.

Task: Create, use and identify ‘rules’ based on observable and/or measurable physical properties of common plastics. Assessment focus: classifying & identifying.

Students are asked to identify a solid, liquid, and a gas. They are also asked to write down two things that are generally true for each of these three states of matter.

Students outline four tests they could do to find out if a newly described substance is a metal.

Reading text to find information about how scientists work. Assessment focus: interpreting information about how scientists work.

Students are provided with drawings of the main types of fingerprints. Students then make their own fingerprint and those of three other students. They then classify and describe the differences between these prints.

Students are provided with a fact file on the tuatara. Students answer four questions that are based on information contained in the fact file.

Students give two pieces of information a scientist could learn from placing bands on the legs of birds.

Task: View photograph to explain how a chiton protects itself in its environment. Assessment focus: identifying features that help to protect an animal in its particular environment.