Characteristics of technology NT 6-1
Achievement Standard 1.8, AS 91051
Characteristics of Technology focuses on students developing an understanding of technology as intervention by design, which is enacted through technological practice that results in technological outcomes. These outcomes are designed to enhance the capability of people and the world in which they live and may results in both positive and negative impacts. Technologists draw on and generate technological knowledge through collaborations within and across communities and other disciplines. Students will also develop an understanding that Technology is historically positioned and inseparable from social and cultural influences and impacts.
Achievement objective: NT 6-1
Students will:
- Understand the interdisciplinary nature of technology and the implications of this for maximising possibilities through collaborative practice.
Indicators
Students can:
- explain how different disciplines have impacted on technological practice
- explain why collaboration is important in
technological developments that involve
interdisciplinary work
- explain how interdisciplinary collaboration
in technology can enhance and/or inhibit
technological development and implementation
- describe examples of interdisciplinary collaboration
in technology that has influenced, or could influence public understanding and acceptance of technology.
Progression
Prior to level 6 students will have explored creative and critical thinking in the context of technological innovation, the codification of knowledge and peoples experiences of technology and how this impacts on the acceptability or not of technological development.
At level 6 students will explore how technologists work collaboratively to produce technological outcomes, bringing specific knowledge and skills together across a range of disciplines.
The Teacher Guidance section provides information that supports teachers scaffolding of learning from levels 1-8 of the curriculum. This allows for differentiation of a programme of learning.
The deliberate use of provide, guide, and support in this section signals that as students' capacity for self-management increases, teachers progressively reduce the level of scaffolding provided.
- Provide – the teacher should take full responsibility for introducing and explicitly teaching new knowledge, skills or practices.
- Guide – the students have a level of understanding and competency on which they can draw but the teacher remains primarily responsible for continuing to develop these.
- Support – the students take primary responsibility for their own learning, drawing on all their previous experiences to consolidate and extend their understanding. The teacher is supportive rather than directive.
- The Teacher Guidance also uses the term ensure to indicate when the teacher plays a monitoring role to check that conditions critical for learning are present.
Teacher guidance
To support students to develop understanding of characteristics of technology at level 6, teachers could:
- support students to analyse a range of examples of technological development and explain how different disciplines have impacted on the nature of the technological practice undertaken and how this in turn has influenced understandings of the contributing disciplines. Examples should include those from the students own work and others’ technological practice and allow students to gain insight into the interdisciplinary nature of technological practice
- support students to explore examples of where collaborative work between technologists and/
or other people has led to new possibilities for technological practice and/or outcome design. Examples should include those from the students own work and others’ technological practice and allow students to gain insight into the way idea generation and exploration can be enhanced through collaboration
- support students to understand that interdisciplinary collaboration provides exciting opportunities to "work at the boundaries" of established fields and appreciate that this may lead to situations where
no codified technological knowledge exists to guide practice, tensions between people may arise, and a greater number of unknown consequences may result
- provide students with opportunities to discuss how the interdisciplinary nature of technology and the need
for collaboration can influence how technology is understood and accepted by different groups in both positive and negative ways.
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Contexts for teaching and learning
Teachers need to support students’ understanding of the knowledge and practices people draw on and the way people work together during technological development. This can be supported in the classroom by using visiting technologists who outline what discipline knowledge they draw upon and how they collaborate during the process of a technological development.
Selecting a suitable and engaging development to introduce the concepts is key to developing student understanding before they begin to research their own topics. Selecting topical news items may be one way of engaging the students enthusiasm and interset as well as considering negotiating the context for the learnign with the students.
It is expected that students will undertake the assessment task after a teaching and learning programme about the technological development they are reporting on, therefore the students need the opportunity to gain understanding of the different disciplines that may have influenced the technological development they are studying.
Students will need to be able to
- describe a technological development ie understand what a technological development is in the context of their learning
- identify two or more disciplines that influence the development of their selected development
- identify the knowledge and practices drawn from different disciplines in the development of a selected development
- consider the role of the individuals associated with the different disciplines
- discuss the collaboration of people from the different disciplines during the technological development: how these people brought together different knowledge bases and practices
- discuss the impact of the interaction of knowledge, practices and collaboration on the development of the outcome
Literacy considerations
Students will need to develop understanding of specialist vocabulary such as
- technological development is an overarching categorisation of a group of technological outcomes. Examples of technological developments include such things as refrigeration, bicycles, virtual reality, world wide web (www), smart materials, functional foods, flat pack furniture, remote control.
- Disciplines are fields of study that include such things as technology, psychology, mathematics, management, law, science, social science, the arts, architecture and ethics. These may exist in isolation (eg physics) or in subsets (eg thermodynamics) or in combination (e.g. mechanical engineering).
Students will need to understand how to identify/describe, explain and discuss aspects of
- to describe is a statement that gives details about the outcome or idea
- to explain is to describe in detail with reasons – often including the how and why
- to discuss requires an explanation that is comprehensive, detailed, broad and show evidence of some complexity in thinking. It may be a reasoned argument presenting a particular point of view, or a comparison and contrast between two ideas or concepts; or it may be a detailed reasoning and relationship between several complex ideas
Resources to support teaching and learning
General resources
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Assessment for qualifications
The following achievement standard(s) could assess learning outcomes from this learning objective:
- AS 91051 Generic Technology 1.8 Demonstrate understanding of how different disciplines influence a technological development
Key messages from the standard
- Allow sufficient time for students to develop the breadth and depth of the evidence required to meet the requirements of the standard. Presentation of evidence covering this aspect of work for assessment would be an individual task but investigation and exploration could be a group or class activity. Material and understandings may inform practice or be a separate set of key understandings related to a separate activity. Evidence may take written or digital format, PowerPoint or storyboards to communicate student understanding.
- Approaches to teaching and learning to support student achievement could be that students undertake a separate stand-alone activity or one that is embedded in or linked to their own practice. However, if students are limited by their own practice, solutions and outcomes; they may not reach sufficient depth and breadth and subsequently not achieve the criteria for this standard
- Prior to beginning the assessment activity, give students the opportunity to gain understanding of the different disciplines that may have influenced the technological development they are studying.
- The technological development explored must clearly draw from two or more disciplines and involve collaboration between individuals, that impact on a particular technological development.
- The step-up to the higher-grade levels of the standard is based around the depth of explanation and discussion of the interaction between the knowledge, practices and collaboration involved in the technological development, and how these factors impacted on the technological development.
- The New Carter Observatory case study (accessible from Technology Online) could be used to access this standard. It clearly shows the interdisciplinary nature of technology and the implications of this for maximising possibilities through collaborative practice.
- Examples of technological developments include but are not limited to – refrigeration, bicycles, virtual reality, world wide web (www), smart materials, functional foods, flat pack furniture, remote control.
- Disciplines are fields of study that include but are not limited to – technology, psychology, mathematics, management, law, science, social science, the arts, architecture and ethics. These may exist in isolation (e.g. physics) or in subsets (e.g. thermodynamics) or in combination (e.g. mechanical engineering).
- Conditions of Assessment related to this achievement standard can be found on TKI's
NCEA website.
For the most up to date information, teachers should be referring to the latest version of the standards, conditions of assessment and assessment resources on TKI and the moderators reports, clarifications documents and student exemplars on the NZQA website. See links below.
Resources to support student achievement
Assessment resource
Annotated Exemplars
Last updated April 8, 2021
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