NAP NAP FLIP FLAP—let’s stop the nonsense now!     001

In the minds of some educational commentators, who should know better, and some misled parents, the period from May to August each year marks the NAPLAN silly season. They believe that schools are overly concerned with preparing children for the NAPLAN assessment to the detriment of more worthwhile aspects of education. Children’s learning—they contend—becomes unbalanced and narrow, because teachers are ‘teaching to the test’. Well, I wish that teachers would do a lot more of this type of teaching. Children don’t seem to get enough of it.

The National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is

a measure through which governments, education authorities, schools teachers and parents can determine whether or not young Australians are meeting important educational outcomes in literacy and numeracy. The tests provide parents and schools with an understanding of how individual students are performing… They also provide schools, states and territories with information about how education programs are working… (NAPLAN official website at www.nap.edu.au)

These purposes in my view are quite justifiable, and serve a variety of needs from a range of stakeholders, including of course you and your children, and your children’s school.

Naturally we would all want NAPLAN to be the very best type of educational test possible—that is we would want it to be highly valid and reliable. Validity, in general, has to do with the degree to which the test measures what it is supposed to. Now the NAPLAN reading test does seem to measure reading performance—and I don’t think many parents or commentators would have serious issue with this. No, most critical comments have to do with perceived reliability—whether the tests measure English and maths performance accurately. Can we really depend on the children’s results and use these results as part of the educational decision making process?

Naturally the designers of these tests go to a significant amount of trouble to achieve the highest reliability possible. Teachers and parents also have a role here.  Children should not be brought to a state of anxiety about the test, for example. Consider the manner in which doctors take their patients’ blood pressures. Always the doctor waits until the patient has had time to relax and then the measurement is taken. The same principle correctly applies to what schools and teachers should do. Children do need to be given some positive practice—not stress inducing—with the format and the types of questions otherwise reliability could be negatively affected, and nobody benefits from that. The NAPLAN program uses taxpayers’ money and we would all want that money spent effectively.

Well just how much practice do schools really give in preparing children for their NAPLAN assessment? Do you think perhaps two or three lessons a week for two or three weeks would be quite reasonable?  I do, and I think you’ll find that is fairly normal. Suppose the lessons add up to a total of ten hours of teaching time. Now a whole year of teaching is about 1000 hours, so most schools are devoting approximately one per cent of lesson time to NAPLAN preparation. It seems though for some people this is just too much!

The NAPLAN reading test consists of questions on a number of passages on different topics. Just doing the test is a worthwhile educational experience in itself—it’s not every day that children engage with such a scientifically designed and attractively presented educational experience—which is far better than what most teachers or schools could provide. Returning now to the official website the marking of the writing component involves criteria such as “audience, text structure, ideas, persuasive devices, vocabulary, cohesion, paragraphing, sentence structure, punctuation and spelling”. Isn’t this exactly the type of thing you would want your young child to be involved with? Or would you like something left out so there could be even more time for the chronic school obsession with dinosaurs?

But let’s continue further in the official website. In the writing test children are provided with “a writing stimulus… idea or topic, and asked to write a response in a particular genre…”. Now perhaps you have an older child doing Year 11 or 12. Look at the English assessment tasks and of course the style of the HSC itself. You will find that the format of all these tests also provides children with a writing idea or topic, and also requests a response in a particular style. Surprise, surprise!

The truth is that preparation for the NAPLAN, and the test itself, provides children with education in the basics of English and maths, and this type of education remains relevant and useful right to the end of secondary school. Indeed the NAPLAN program helps meet the educational needs of the entire country. It is time the program was better understood and appreciated, and it is time to stop the nonsense of hyperbolic criticism. Such wasted energy would be much better directed to improving the value and application of the NAPLAN program still further.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services