TESTING TIMES
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What exactly is NAPLAN AND HOW DO I PREPARE MY KIDS FOR IT?
by Misty Adoniou Senior Lecturer in Language, Literacy and TESL at University of Canberra
The national testing season begins on Tuesday May 12th as children in Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 around the country sit the writing, spelling and grammar tests of the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). Reading and numeracy will follow on Wednesday and Thursday. So, what can you do to improve your child’s performance in NAPLAN between now and then? Nothing. It is not a test you can “prepare” for. And making it a big deal won’t improve students’ performances, although it may increase their anxiety and reduce their performance.
WHAT IS IN THE TEST? NAPLAN is given a lot of media and teaching time each year, and is the core of the My School website. Many important decisions are made by teachers and parents on the basis of the results. Yet, very few know what is in the tests, or what they seek to assess. NAPLAN is not connected to the Australian curriculum, so it is not an assessment of the content students learn each day at school. NAPLAN’s reference document is the “Statements of Learning”. It is a general assessment of literacy and numeracy proficiency, providing a snapshot of how kids around the country answer a particular set of maths and English test questions one day in May. How your children perform will be the result of all their years at school, not what they did in the weeks leading up to the test. In the writing test students are given a writing prompt and 40 minutes to produce either a persuasive or narrative piece of writing. The time limit of 40 minutes is nonsense (since when has speed been a mark of good writing?), but the marking criteria for the writing are sensible. Writing is marked for its appeal to audience and its overall structure; the ideas within the writing and the logical connection of those ideas; the use of literary tools to build characters or persuade the reader; sentence structure; depth and breadth of vocabulary; paragraphing, punctuation and spelling. Each criterion is weighted differently, with appeal to audience, sentence structure and spelling attracting the most marks.
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The spelling and grammar paper tests whether students are over reliant on “sounding out” when spelling, and whether they can use Standard Australian English. The reading paper tests whether students can do more than decode the words on the page. It tests the extent of their vocabulary and whether they can infer information from texts.
TEACHING TO THE TEST A newly qualified teacher I know was asked by her supervisor what she was doing to prepare her class for NAPLAN. She replied “I’m teaching them”. Great answer, although her supervisor was less then happy with her response. Around two thirds of schools will spend several hours a week on test preparation as the new school term begins. This spurt of “teaching to the test” is not only ill-conceived, it is damaging. Last year, scores in the writing test dipped. The curriculum and assessment authority (ACARA) which oversees the test, suggested it was because of “over preparation”. That’s a polite way of saying - “stop making your kids learn essays by heart”. It doesn’t help students in the test, and it is probably changing their general attitude to writing. Q. How many formulaic persuasive essays on school uniforms/canteen food/staying up late does it take to turn a child off writing? A. Not many
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