Materials and Processing Technology webcasts

Kia ora and welcome.

This webcast is intended to provide guidance and advice on the requirements for the Level 1 Materials and Processing Technology standard 92013.

Specifically, this webcast will unpack the requirements to ‘explore’ and ‘investigate’ the performance properties of different materials.
Let's have a look at what the standard requires.

To Achieve, students will physically explore the properties of more than one material using the experimental methods in Explanatory Note 3 of the standard.

For Merit and above, students will investigate the properties of different materials through ongoing experimentation using methods of transforming, combining, manipulating or forming.

The expressions ‘explore’ and ‘investigate’ relate to the depth of the experimentation.

The standard does require that 2 or more materials must be used to explore or discover 2 or more performance properties.

So what would exploration look like? 

The student has physically transformed, combined, manipulated and/or formed the materials, observed the way the materials perform and then made a decision on which material to select for their purposeful outcome.

The experiment is likely a single test or trial.

So what is the distinction between exploration and investigation?

A key to this criterion is continuous experimentation with materials to understand more about their performance properties.

The exploration has to be more than one time study, and must show evidence of an iterative cycle of experimentation, analysis and refinement. This means that the student’s understanding of material performance properties is strengthened or deepened as they undertake further physical experiments using, again, the methods from Explanatory Note 3.

So what is not considered evidence of exploration or investigation?

• While research can support experiments, evidence must demonstrate physical, hands-on experimentation.
• Although students may use simulations to experiment with different materials, this alone does not qualify as exploration or investigation.
• Experiments that do not use the methods from Explanatory Note 3 are not considered exploration or investigation.
• Evidence where the student has used the methods from Explanatory Note 3, but not observed performance properties, will not attain the standard.
• Remember, the intent of the standard is for students to deeply explore and make deliberate choices regarding the selection of performance properties and materials. Unrelated multiple experiments do not count as investigation.

For more explanation and examples of what is required for this aspect, see the Materials and Processing Technology National Moderator Report and exemplars on the NZQA website.  

There are also annotated samples of student evidence on the Assessor Practice Tool for 92013. These show the different ways in which this aspect can be met.

Further assessor support for the internal Achievement Standards in Materials and Processing Technology can be found on our assessor support catalogue available on the NZQA website.  

Thank you.