Assessing and understanding the achievement of primary school students across the New Zealand curriculum. The programme has been in operation since 2012, building on the strengths of NEMP (National Education Monitoring Project 1995-2010), and is a collaboration between the Educational Assessment Research Unit at the University of Otago, the New Zealand Council for Educational Research and the Ministry of Education.

The purpose of the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) is to get a broad picture of student achievement in New Zealand. It does this by assessing representative samples of New Zealand school students at successive points in time so that:

• trends in educational performance can be identified and reported;
• factors that influence student achievement can be identified and reported;
• good information is available to assist policy makers, curriculum specialists
  and educators with their planning and
• the public has more information about trends in educational achievement.