By Mikayla van Loon
Changes to NAPLAN come into effect this March, as students prepare to sit the national proficiency test two months earlier than normal in an attempt to bring the availability of results forward.
Victoria Road Primary School principal Lisa Branch said while the lead up to this year’s NAPLAN seems rushed given the earlier date, it will become normal after this year.
“The hope is that we will get the results of NAPLAN earlier than we normally do. So that way there might be some benefit in the assessment for schools because usually it’s not particularly beneficial for schools,” she said.
“We get those results so late it doesn’t help us to really determine anything much about our students.”
The way testing is completed will also change, with much of the assessment now to be done online, something Ms Branch said may create challenges for students.
“Almost all of it’s online, the year three writing one will still be a paper test,” she said.
“Where it’s tricky, for example, with numeracy, we have really high results for numeracy in our school but the way that we teach children numeracy and the way we work through numeracy doesn’t line up with the way NAPLAN functions at all.”
Ms Branch said when teaching numeracy, teachers provide students many different strategies to work through a problem to apply the best one.
“They would have to make an assessment on which types of strategies they will use, they will be applying critical thinking, problem solving, they’re working collaboratively with teams to solve problems.
“When you then put them in front of a test and say, ‘this is time limited and it’s just going to keep pushing through the test’ they don’t test particularly well in that sense, because that’s not how we teach numeracy.
“So it’s always a bit disappointing to see that the test doesn’t really reflect best practice in terms of teaching and with it being online, possibly even more so.”
Not only does the new online format potentially bring with it technical and mechanical challenges, Ms Branch said the age-old concerns about the benefits of NAPLAN for schools and students is still an issue.
“You want an assessment to assess what it is children know, and the fact we teach it very differently to how NAPLAN is tested means we don’t really see what our children know in NAPLAN.
“We have very robust and detailed assessment schedules and methods and tools and the way that we analyse data from those is very specific. We get a lot of information from those things that we don’t really get much information at all from NAPLAN.”
Another concern Ms Branch has with the way NAPLAN is reported publicly is that it is rather confusing and “basically allows them to stack school against school”.
“It’s actually a very broad brushstroke of some small snapshot of information and so people shopping around for schools and basing their choices on the small bit of information they’ve got out of NAPLAN is really unhelpful.
“What we’d want would be for families to be choosing a school that’s a good fit for their family and their values and how that lines up with the school’s values.”
Logistically preparing for NAPLAN to start on 15 March, Ms Branch said it’s always a lot of work in setting up rooms and computers ready for the assessments.
Not teaching to the test means students will go about their normal curriculum, with teachers only guiding them through how the test will be formatted and how to ensure they complete it properly.
NAPLAN will run from 15 to 27 March, giving schools a nine day window to complete the assessments across writing, reading, conventions of language and numeracy.
