industry & reform
Missing the mark
After 10 years, does NAPLAN
still make the grade?
By Kirstie Chlopicki
A
fter a successful campaign to
scrap the compulsory rollout
of NAPLAN online testing in
Queensland, experts are asking the
inevitable question: is NAPLAN testing still
worthwhile?
The University of the Sunshine Coast’s
Associate Professor Michael Nagel
specialises in research on childhood
cognition and learning, and favours doing
away with the testing altogether.
“The research around standardised
testing is pretty conclusive, in that
standardised testing paradoxically leads to
much lower standards,” he said.
“I think there are three major problems
with NAPLAN. The first is that standardised
tests are limited in determining what a
student actually knows or has learnt,
so they don’t give us a very good
understanding of what a student knows.
“The second thing is that they quickly
become a high-stakes endeavour, making
for a competitive environment.
“They’re used to compare things that they
shouldn’t be used to compare. You should
never take a diagnostic tool – which is
what NAPLAN’s meant to be – and use it to
compare, and that’s exactly what happens.
We use it to compare students, to compare
classrooms, schools – God forbid we start
comparing teachers.
“The most worrying thing in my
professional opinion is the sheer stress
NAPLAN puts, not just on the students,
primarily students, but also on teachers and
12 | educationreview.com.au
parents. We should be looking to examine
what the children know in ways that don’t
create stomach pains and nausea. We have
studies that tell us that NAPLAN does this
to children.”
Nagel is among a number of experts
who believe the best way to assess
student outcomes is to let teachers
exercise autonomy and conduct student
assessment in cooperation with parents.
“In this country we have a tendency
when things don’t look well to bag
teachers,” he said. “In Finland, in contrast,
they have a tendency to trust teachers
in what they do, and I think the more we
would trust teachers, and allow them to
make determinations about where kids
are at, in conjunction with working with
parents, the better off we would be.
“No two kids are the same, and teachers
are trained to look at what kids can do,
what they can’t do, and help to move
them along.”
Statistician and standardised testing
specialist Associate Professor Jihyun Lee
is based at UNSW Sydney, and researches
student assessments. Responsible
for researching large-scale student
assessments such as NAPLAN, Lee said it
was time for a review of the system.
“I welcome the Queensland education
minister’s call for a review,” she said. “It’s
common sense that any system should be
reviewed after 10 years.
“At present we do not know how students
really feel about the NAPLAN test. At the
beginning of its induction, high levels of
anxiety – especially from younger students
– grabbed headlines in the education
sections of the newspapers, which doesn’t
seem to be the case anymore.
“The public and academics in the
related fields are also not sure about how
teachers use the NAPLAN assessment
results to inform individual students’
learning and whether teachers find
add-on values of NAPLAN in addition
to what they already know about
their students.
“There is also a question at the national
level; that is, how much knowledge
and information is gained for the
public, educators, policymakers and
academics about our students’ academic
achievement?”
A third expert who weighed in on the
debate was Griffith University’s professor of
English curriculum and literacy education,
Beryl Exley.
Exley raised the point that standardised
testing was both costly and had limited
usefulness.
“We know NAPLAN is an expensive
exercise, and we also know that the
NAPLAN era has produced collateral
damage on narrowing the curriculum,”
she said. “For example, literacy has been
reduced to the literal comprehension
scores and a very elementary form of
generic writing.
“We know NAPLAN is affecting
pedagogical practice; students are
experiencing the teaching of writing
as having to learn two basic generic
structures instead of writing as a creative
craft that moves across multiple genres
depending on audience, purpose and
context. We know there are issues when
a certain form of assessment is privileged
over other forms of more authentic
assessment that teachers, parents and
children find useful.
“A major ARC-funded study showed that
the NAPLAN juggernaut eroded principals’
time in schools, taking them away from
other important roles, and unless we have
a way of redressing that erosion of time
on tasks that really matter, it’s difficult to
say that we should continue to support
NAPLAN in its current form.
“National standardised assessment can
be useful for providing a health check on
the education system per se, but it’s not
necessary to have census assessment for
all students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9.
“A cross-section assessment will provide
enough data to provide a picture of what’s
happening in the system and to determine
the impact of various initiatives in certain
communities.” ■