NAPLAN is much more gain than pain

 

More than a million Australian students sat NAPLAN tests this week, assessing their standards in reading, writing, language and numeracy.

This is a positive contribution to our school system. But you wouldn’t guess it from the howling chorus of hysterical claims that NAPLAN causes an annual epidemic of student stress and is a monumental waste of time.

The truth is the national assessment program remains a vital educational tool and there is no reliable evidence it has widespread negative effects on students.

NAPLAN helps improve schools and teaching, by identifying problems in the school system over time and enabling potential solutions — from the national level all the way down to individual students.

It provides transparency for school results. And it holds governments and schools accountable for the more than $50 billion of taxpayer money invested in the school system every year. Little wonder that — despite criticisms from the education union — parents groups are generally supportive of it.

Claims that it harms students are at best superficial and at worst downright misleading. There have been very few studies to date on the impact on students, and the existing research is mostly based on surveys or samples so small as to be insignificant.

For example, one widely-cited survey claiming NAPLAN causes widespread student anxiety issues is based only on the responses of education union members — and with a very low survey response rate, at that.

Another study was based on analysing student drawings of their test experience and student descriptions of their own drawings in a single school. Much more rigorous evidence is required before any strong conclusion can be drawn.

There is a world of difference between serious mental health issues and the low levels of nervousness associated with any school assessment, test or exam.

The other target of NAPLAN naysayers is the MySchool website, where school results are published and can be compared to other schools and the national average. Critics allege MySchool harms schools by forcing them to focus excessively on doing well on NAPLAN tests, as parents will not enrol their children at schools with relatively poor results.

Again, there is little evidence to support this claim. The small amount of research to date is from surveys that don’t actually indicate MySchool is having a negative effect on the school system.

MySchool is important for parents. Parents choose schools based on many different factors, including academic achievement. Having access to NAPLAN results allows parents a more informed choice for their children’s education success.

And when we’re constantly told parents should be more engaged in their kids’ education, it would be utterly absurd to tell parents they shouldn’t have any knowledge of how their school is performing compared to national standards.

So what is the future for NAPLAN?

The Gonski 2.0 report’s recommended new online continuous assessment tool — which doesn’t appear to be practical and isn’t supported by much evidence — will definitely not be able to replace it anytime in the foreseeable future.

However, NAPLAN’s move to online will significantly improve the tests, by cutting the lag time between students taking the tests and schools receiving the results, and also allowing for tailored questions depending on the ability level of students.

Even critics of NAPLAN concede Australia needs some form of national assessment. The alternative proposed is a sample test, which would test only a small group of students, rather than the population.

However, a sample test would be woefully inadequate, as it couldn’t be used as a tool to help individual students and schools, and would not promote school transparency and accountability.

10 years after NAPLAN’s introduction, there has been no consistent, national improvement, although results have gone up in some states and test topics. This is concerning, but not a reason to abandon the assessment. Blaming NAPLAN for the lack of improvement is analogous to blaming the scales for a lack of weight loss. NAPLAN measures student performance, and whether or not it leads to improved results depends largely on how schools respond.

It is reasonable to investigate how NAPLAN data can be used more effectively to help students. A possible review of NAPLAN — which education ministers are currently considering — should focus on such issues, rather than an exploration of killing it off.

NAPLAN remains an essential part of the school system. The focus must be on improving it, not scrapping it. We owe this to students, teachers and parents — and taxpayers.

Blaise Joseph is an education policy analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of the research report Why We Need NAPLAN.