Ah yes NAPLAN.... when I was at school we had what was known as the BASIC SKILLS TEST... our version of NAPLAN. It was fun to do, lots of multiple choice questions very structured easy to follow directions and it came about every 3 years roughly after starting primary school.NAPLAN is essential, so let’s work to make it more effective for us all
Blaise Joseph
The Australian
12:00AM May 18, 2018
More than a million Australian students have sat National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy tests this week, assessing their standards in reading, writing, language and numeracy.
This is a positive contribution to our school system, but you wouldn’t know it from the howling chorus of hysterical claims that NAPLAN causes an annual epidemic of student stress and is a monumental waste of time.
The truth is the program remains a vital educational tool and there is no reliable evidence it is at all negative for students.
NAPLAN helps improve schools and teaching by identifying problems in the school system across time and enabling potential solutions, from the national level down to individual students.
It provides transparency for school results. And it holds governments and schools accountable for the more than $50 billion of taxpayer money invested in the school system annually. Little wonder that, despite criticisms from the education union, parents generally support it.
Claims that it harms students are at best superficial and at worst misleading. There have been very few studies on the impact on students, and the existing research is mostly based on surveys or samples so small as to be insignificant.
One widely cited survey claiming NAPLAN causes widespread student anxiety issues is based only on the responses of education union members, and with a very low survey response rate at that.
Another study was based on analysing student drawings of their test experience and student descriptions of their own drawings in a single school. More rigorous evidence is required before any conclusion can be drawn.
There is a world of difference between serious mental health issues and the low levels of nervousness associated with any school assessment, test or exam.
The other target of NAPLAN nay-sayers is the My School website, where school results are published and can be compared with other schools and the national average. Critics allege My School harms schools by forcing them to focus excessively on doing well on NAPLAN tests, as parents will not enrol their children at schools with inferior results.
Again, there is little evidence to support this. The small amount of research to date is from surveys that don’t indicate My School is having an adverse effect on the school system.
My School is important for parents. Parents choose schools based on many different factors, including academic achievement. Having access to NAPLAN results allows parents a more informed choice.
And when we’re constantly told parents should be more engaged in their kids’ education, it would be counter-productive to tell parents they shouldn’t have any knowledge of how their school is performing compared with national standards.
So, what is the future for NAPLAN?
The Gonski 2.0 report’s recommended new online continuous assessment tool, which doesn’t appear to be practical and isn’t supported by much evidence, definitely will not be able to replace it in the foreseeable future.
However, NAPLAN’s move to online will improve the tests significantly by cutting the lag time between students taking the tests and schools receiving the results, and also allowing for tailored questions depending on the ability level of students.
Even critics of NAPLAN concede Australia needs some form of national assessment. The alternative proposed is a sample test, which would test only a small group of students rather than the population.
However, a sample test would be completely inadequate, as it couldn’t be used as a tool to help individual students and schools, and would not promote school transparency and accountability.
A decade after NAPLAN’s introduction, there has been no consistent, national improvement, although results have gone up in some states and test subjects. This is concerning but not a reason to abandon the assessment. Blaming NAPLAN for the lack of improvement is like blaming the scales for a lack of weight loss. NAPLAN measures student performance, and whether it leads to improved results depends largely on how schools respond.
It is reasonable to investigate how NAPLAN data can be used more effectively to help students. A possible review of NAPLAN, which education ministers are considering, should focus on such issues.
NAPLAN remains an essential part of the school system. The focus must be on improving it, not scrapping it. We owe this to students, teachers and parents — and taxpayers.
Blaise Joseph is an education policy analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies and the author of the research report Why We Need NAPLAN.
gonski or the "throw money at it" policy has been shown to be a failure... money is NOT the problem. The Curriculum is...
Time we got back to the BASICS... and stopped flushing good money down the loo.
