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.

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.

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.

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.

Task: Use features of velociraptors to make inferences about their life style. Assessment focus: using evidence to make inferences.

Task: Match cards to show the relationship of birds' beaks and feet to the food they eat. Assessment focus: adaptations.

Task: Answer questions about the relationship between mass and stretch. Assessment focus: graph interpretation.

Students use two diagrams of the night sky to answer a multiple-choice question on each.

Students use the Beaufort Scale of wind speed to categorise diary entries about the wind in Auckland.

Students use a table about properties of different materials to answer questions about this, and to group the materials listed into two groups.

Task: Place in order six statements about a series of food chain related events in a beech forest, and justify decisions. Assessment focus: interdependence.