This week students in Years 3,5,7 and 9 are completing, for the first time, national tests in literacy and numeracy, NAPLAN. Whilst this has been common place in America, England and other countries its the first time in Australia we have had the same test across Australia.
As expected the tests have drawn widespread comment in newspapers and schools: crazy and a waste of time by Melbourne pschologist Andrew Fuller and teaching to the test has its benefits by Kevin Donnelly.
Perhaps a more telling story can be drawn from the article “backdown on national school league tables“. Common sense has prevailed at least this year as publishing league tables based on this limited set of tests would be misleading. Imagine comparing schools in higher socio- economic communities with those schools who have a large cohort of non English speaking refugees. League tables for example do not show entry skill levels and so are by and large are misleading. Schools are still expected to report on student achievement in national tests in their annual reports which, at least in Victoria, are published on the schools website. This provides parents with clear information about the results of the school and how it intends to improve its performance in the coming years.
Most people accept that these tests do provide some data to bureaucracies and governments that enable them to better target resources to those students most in need of additional support.
On a personal level I have spent some time with my son this week preparing him for the tests. Why? Like all parents you want your child to do the best that they can. So I printed out some samples from the VCAA website went through the language of the questions with him so that he could understand what the question was actually asking and how one might go about getting an answer. Test language is a genre in itself and in my opinion it’s the language which confuses most students not the content.
This morning as I was distributing the NAPLAN reading test material to the coordinator, amid very tight VCE like security, we commented on the fact that we had at least spent some time teaching the students the test language and thus prepared them as well as we could. Is this teaching to the test? Some might argue differently but I would say we haven’t taught test content but rather language and skills which are transferrable and therefore useful.
Finally I know we used the previous state-wide test results along with other data [e.g. teacher assessments, online tests and reading level results] to adjust our curiculum emphasis and focus our professional learning program and I’m hopeful that these new national test will provide some useful data as well.
