It looks like Naplan is changing, yet again, the general trend doesn't seem to be changing, everyone's doing great. ?
Students will sit NAPLAN tests this week, with the 10-band assessment of their literacy and numeracy skills to be replaced by a simpler four-band measure.
More than 1.3 million Australian students will have their reading, writing and maths skills assessed when they sit NAPLAN tests this week, with the results to be delivered to parents and schools months earlier than in previous years.
Test report cards will also be radically
overhauled, with the 10 NAPLAN bands and national minimum standard dumped in favour of four proficiency categories: exceeding; strong; developing; and needs additional support.
But about 30 per cent of students could fall short of the national benchmark for
literacy and numeracy under the new measures, as results in the lowest two bands will signal a student has not met proficiency.
This year, tests will be held in March rather than May, so schools and parents can see results earlier, which will allow teachers more time to act on gaps in students’ knowledge.
All tests will be held online except for year 3 writing, and schools will receive results in term 2. Parents could receive student report cards in July.
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A spokesman for the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) said preliminary work that was undertaken to set the four new progress levels found about 30 per cent of students would not have met the proficiency benchmark in 2022.
This includes about 10 per cent of students in the lowest-performing category called “needs additional support”. Last year, about 7.3 per cent of students were, on average, below the national minimum standard.
“Until the 2023 data is available, we cannot determine the exact proportion of students in the four new bands,” the authority’s spokesman said.
“The proficiency standard sets a higher level of achievement than the national minimum standard.
“A child whose results fall within the ‘developing’ or ‘needs additional support’ categories will not have met proficiency.”
NAPLAN – the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy – was introduced in 2008 to test the literacy and numeracy skills of Australian students in
years 3, 5, 7 and 9.
Centre for Independent Studies director of education Glenn Fahey said several international tests use proficiency levels to define achievement.
“Thinking in terms of proficiency ultimately sets our sights on how schooling can lift the literacy and numeracy skills of all students in the system,” he said.
But Fahey said the new band descriptions were unclear, and the better way to record four levels of proficiency would be: above proficient, proficient, below proficient, well below proficient.
“This would be a lot more commonsense than the vague and potentially misleading labels of ‘strong’ and ‘developing’, which basically denote being at an acceptable level and below an acceptable level, respectively,” he said.
Fahey also warned reporting changes would make comparisons with the past 15 years of results almost impossible.
“The ability to track progress has been an invaluable feature of NAPLAN,” he said. “Without the ability to track results, we are left with anecdotes and pseudo-indicators of achievement. This is an unacceptable way to judge the performance of an education system.”
Grattan Institute education program director Jordana Hunter said there was a risk parents and schools could get a false sense of achievement about how well some students were progressing under the new categories.
Students in the third band will have fallen below proficiency benchmarks, but the fact they will be classed as “developing” could confuse some parents and create the false impression their child was developing well when the ranking indicates they might need intervention, Hunter said.
At Brandon Park Primary School, in Wheelers Hill, preparation for NAPLAN last week was limited to one session where students familiarised themselves with the technology for the online test.
The school was last month identified by ACARA as one of the state’s highest performing in NAPLAN over the past four years.
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Results at the government school were above or well above results at schools with similar students in all 10 testing domains last year, but principal Kate Buck said the school does no special preparations for NAPLAN before students sit the test.
“The kids know they have to do it, but we don’t put a massive amount of pressure on the kids at all for NAPLAN,” Buck said.
“We believe what we are doing is working, and it’s going to show in the NAPLAN anyway.”
It wasn’t always that way. In 2018, the school investigated why its literacy results had plateaued, particularly with spelling, a domain in which just 16 per cent of students showed strong growth.
The school replaced its balanced approach to literacy with an explicit phonics-based methodology that revolves around teaching children the code to letter-sound relationships, Buck said.
By 2021, 42 per cent of students had achieved high growth. Buck said NAPLAN was an important tool for tracking student progress, and that the school’s strong recent results validated its teaching methods.
Brandon Park is a zoned school now and turns down many applications from parents seeking to enrol from outside its catchment.
“We try to really bring our community into the teaching practices that we’ve got and that’s the main reason people want to come to our school, because of the structured way we teach,” Buck said.