As Wilson asserts in ‘Say NO to NAPLAN’, for accurate “assessment of reading to be relevant to teaching and learning, what is being assessed should match what is being taught and how it is being taught” (2012, p9). NAPLAN testing as it stands, does not represent this view of reading in Australian classrooms, nor does it assist literacy education in any way. Reading connects with a person’s memories, life experiences, thoughts and philosophies. These elements are what makes reading for individuals wonderful as they each take something different from what they’ve read. Critical reading is important for learning, where students can read and re-read text to consider all points and analyse author bias. Wilson also suggests that in the process of learning to read, it is important to re-visit texts so learners have the opportunity for meanings to be revised and elaborated upon (2012, p9). The NAPLAN view of reading is very different from the current view of reading. NAPLAN removes individuality from test answers as a student is meant to simply seek out the correct specific answer from the booklet. This is challenging for me as a pre-service teacher as my pedagogy places focus on the knowledge of individual students and my ability to help them discover their own gifts and talents. Students are under pressure to read and answer questions very quickly. What sort of example is this setting? One of the main issues I had in my year 11 english class was students not reading the question properly, only answering part of the question or not giving an answer that could be further developed. Now I realise, NAPLAN teaches students to do exactly that. The test is killing critical and divergent thinking in learners, and now we have to ask ourselves, what are they actually learning? NAPLAN testing goes against my view of constructivist learning. In the test, students are passive. Discussion, collaboration, questioning and exploration on ones own views have no place during the test, students are essentially robots. As a drama and literacy teacher, I find it extremely disheartening in this day and age that standardised testing still exists. Learners are not being assessed on their levels of achievement in all fields, just labelled by two. This damages confidence in students, siphons teaching and learning ability and is an extremely inaccurate form of assessment for learning. Jo O’Mara discusses the effects of NAPLAN on teachers via interviews. One participant commented “I have had to diminish and, in places, abandon aspects of what was a very rich curriculum for Year 9 in order to accommodate the focus on NAPLAN preparation. I feel my students have been far less engaged. It's not been a happy year so far.” (O’Mara, 2014). Standardised testing is undoing all the work of teachers who are trying to engage and make learning rich for students. This is a great challenge for me as engagement in learning is a key focus in my teaching, especially in literacy. If teachers are having to abandon activities and reduce work in exploring certain topics because NAPLAN is taking up valuable learning time, we have to ask ourselves what kind of education system are we running? At it’s core, NAPLAN is a scheme that is “linked to political ambitions and economic interests, with little thought for our children’s future or our national welfare” (Cullen, 2012, p19). This is an aspect of our system that I hope to contribute to, in terms of ridding it from Australia. We need to cherish and take pride in individual learning ability and stop using test results of students to gage success (although inaccurate) of teachers and schools. A good teacher is one that is engaging and values each individual gift learners present in the class room, and a good school supports this type of learning. Say NO to NAPLAN.
NAPLAN:
Affecting reading in the literacy classroom
"And this is deep in the gene pool of public education; there are only two types of people - academic and non-academic; smart people and non smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they're not because they've been judged against this particular view of the mind.”
-Ken Robinson, changing education paradigms