History webcasts

Kia ora and welcome.

This webcast is intended to provide guidance and advice on the requirements for 92024: Engage with a variety of primary sources in a historical context.

Specifically, this webcast will explore the Excellence requirements for this standard.

 For Excellence, the standard requires the examination of a variety of primary sources. In addition to the Merit requirements, students will need to make connections between the main ideas of the selected sources and reflect on the strengths and limitations across the collection of sources.

Let’s look at the first Excellence criterion. When making the connections between the selected sources it is important that the discussion focuses on the main ideas. These ideas are identified by students as part of the Merit criteria.

There are many ways to provide evidence for this criterion. Some students choose to do this as part of their source annotations. This often occurs naturally when students corroborate the ideas in the sources to make a comment about reliability.

Others choose to write a short paragraph at the end of their collection of sources summarising the similarities or differences in the main ideas of the sources.

Some prefer to complete a table that may have been provided by teachers as part of the assessment task.

Typically, these templates ask students to identify the main ideas in each source (as is required for Merit) and then, importantly for the Excellence criterion, the common ideas that exist between the sources.

Students can use any method successfully, as long as they focus on the main ideas in the sources. Connections based on the source type or a shared author (for example), do not meet the criterion.

The second Excellence criterion requires students to reflect on the strengths and limitations across the collection. Explanatory Note 4 further defines this as “a collective assessment of all the sources as a whole.”

This evidence is most successfully demonstrated as a final paragraph. The discussion must move beyond individual sources and focus on how the collection works together as a whole.

When looking at the collective limitations of the sources, students are effectively asking themselves “When I look at all my chosen sources, whose voice is missing? What is a consistent or reoccurring limitation? What part of the answer is not addressed by these sources?”

When reflecting on the collective strengths of the sources, students might consider aspects such as the sufficiency, balance, coverage, nuanced elements that have been captured, the range of perspectives present, or consistent strengths across all sources such as strong corroboration or reliability.

The reflection of the strengths and limitations of the collection should be specific and fully explained to ensure the evidence overall aligns with expectations for Excellence at curriculum level 6.

For more explanation and examples of what is required for this aspect, see the exemplars on the NZQA website.  

There are also annotated samples of student evidence on the Assessor Practice Tool for 92024. These clearly show the type of evidence required for the aspect discussed in this webcast.

Further assessor support for the internal Achievement Standards in History can be found on our assessor support catalogue, available on the NZQA website.  

Thank you.