After a decade, what is NAPLAN doing for us?

NAPLAN has been in place, largely unaltered, for ten years now, and hasn’t led to any significant improvement. So why do we keep doing it, asks Rebecca Hack.

AS parents, we all want to know how our child is doing at school.

Every year students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 sit for a series of NAPLAN tests and their parents receive a NAPLAN report which they are told provides ‘information about what students know and have achieved in the areas of reading, writing, language conventions and numeracy’.

What’s not to like about that? Well, quite a bit as it turns out.

Student wellbeing

NAPLAN causes students to feel stress and anxiety, and the tests have a negative impact on kids’ attitudes to learning.

A major report released by the Whitlam Institute found that almost 90 per cent of teachers reported students felt stressed prior to taking the tests. Significant numbers reported students being sick, crying or having sleepless nights, while some teachers even reported specific stress-related conditions such as insomnia, hyperventilation, profuse sweating, nail biting, headaches, stomach aches and migraines in their students.

These unintended consequences “stem from the failure to take the interests of all students seriously. The formal and inflexible style of NAPLAN is not conducive to learning and teaching approaches that emphasise deep learning”.

The Whitlam Institute found that almost 90 per cent of teachers reported students felt stressed prior to taking the tests. (Pic: supplied)

Are my child’s results reliable?

Critics of NAPLAN say the tests don’t provide the high-quality information about children parents say they want and worse, that the information is being misused. They also say NAPLAN only covers a very small part of the curriculum kids are being taught.

NAPLAN was designed as a tool to measure the performance of school systems. It was never intended to be a measure of an individual student’s progress.

What we are not told as parents is that there is a large degree of error whenever an individual child’s results are calculated. The papers are limited in length and what they can cover. For example, the Year 3 numeracy test contains only 35 questions. This is not a broad enough sample to be sure you are testing what a child knows and can do across the mathematics curriculum.

Professor Margaret Wu, from the University of Melbourne, explains that statistically any individual child’s score on a NAPLAN test can fluctuate by about 12 per cent up or down. For example, if a child scored 70 per cent on a NAPLAN test, then sat the same test with a different combination of questions, they would score anywhere from 58 per cent to 82 per cent. This is because NAPLAN tests only have space for a very small number of questions.

Clearly, with this degree of variation, the individual reports we receive about our child’s performance do not give us reliable information about what our child knows and can do. Instead, if we want accurate information about how our child is going at school, we are far better off sitting down with the teacher and having a conversation.

How does NAPLAN affect teaching?

Many schools are pressured to teach to the NAPLAN test. This is changing what is taught in classrooms. You only have to look at how frequently children are taught the genre of ‘persuasive writing’ in schools all over the country to know that this is true.

Research into the impact of NAPLAN by the Whitlam institute reported a narrowing of both teaching strategies and of the curriculum. Robyn Ewing believes the increasing focus on high stakes testing leads to an increasing priority on subject areas that can be measured by multiple choice tests and reduces time spent teaching students to express themselves through art, poetry, drama, music and literature.

Evidence is now available that schools all over Australia are cutting back on arts education to devote more time to literacy and numeracy. Richard Gill (OAM) states these activities “destroy individuality, stifle creativity, stultify thought and make all children respond in the same way”.

Children are missing out on taking time to observe their environment, engage in abstract thinking, work collaboratively, and think reflectively. This reduction in creativity reduces the engagement and motivation of our children.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the NAPLAN tests are not the best measure of a child’s literacy and numeracy ability. (Pic: supplied)

What do the tests actually measure?

It is becoming increasingly clear that the NAPLAN tests are not the best measure of a child’s literacy and numeracy ability.

Recently one of the world’s leading education experts, Dr Les Perelman, completed a review of the NAPLAN writing test. His conclusions are damning, describing the test as “by far the most absurd and least valid of any test that I’ve seen”, that it is “trivial at best and incorrect at worst”, the marking criteria as “bizarre” and that it is “turning students into bad writers”.

Lorraine Wilson, author and award-winning educator, analysed the 2010 Year 3 NAPLAN Reading Magazine and found it contained 1240 words across six articles. The actual test booklet had 12 pages with 35 test questions to read. Students have only 45 minutes to complete the test, including reading the articles, reading the test questions, considering the alternative answers and recording the answer. Prior to starting the test teachers read a required script, which in this case contained no fewer than 17 instructions.

For our children wishing to achieve on the reading test, speed has become the priority, rather than deep consideration of ideas. Understanding of the text is conveyed by shading a bubble. Is this really the best way to measure how well our child can read and understand text?

In Year 3, NAPLAN only tests the spelling of about 25 words. They are not drawn from any pre-taught list so familiarity with these words will vary from child to child and school to school. This is hardly a comprehensive way to analyse the spelling ability of our children.

It’s time for a full NAPLAN review

It’s been ten years since NAPLAN was introduced. It has been in place, largely unaltered, for a decade now, and has not led to any significant improvement of literacy and numeracy outcomes.

At an individual level it is a clunky measure, with limited accuracy. It causes stress in our children and in their teachers and has led to a reduction in what our children are taught.

Its time to look at how we, as a nation, can do this better.

Rebecca Hack is a parent, a primary school principal, a Queensland Teachers’ Union Principal Representative and member of The Parenthood.