Five Northern Tasmanian schools have significantly improved their NAPLAN results, new data shows, while Tasmanian experts have joined calls for a review of the national numeracy and literacy test.
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The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority updated the My School website overnight with individual school NAPLAN results for 2017.
Exeter Primary, Punchbowl Primary, Evandale Primary, Perth Primary and Deloraine High School were all commended by ACARA for making “substantially above average” improvements in their scores over the past year.
The schools’ gains were measured against previous years’ results, compared to schools with a similar socioeconomic status, and compared to other students who started with similar NAPLAN scores.
ACARA chief executive Robert Randall said while schools were “more than just their NAPLAN results”, having fresh quarterly and yearly information on literacy and numeracy results gave schools an opportunity to learn from each other’s results.
Now in its tenth year, NAPLAN is under scrutiny over its role in education testing, with more questions over whether the program is being used as intended by parents, teachers and experts in assessing performance.
Incremental improvements in Australia’s national numeracy and literacy scores over the past 10 years have also raised questions about the worth of NAPLAN as a testing system.
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Tasmanian advocates have joined national calls for a full review of the NAPLAN system, saying after ten years it has become an increasingly high-stakes, stress-inducing test for students, rather than its original set-up as a diagnostic tool for schools and teachers to assess strengths and weaknesses.
Tasmanian Principals Association president Malcolm Elliott said after 10 years it was “a good time” for a review to consider what the testing program had produced, and what the sector had learned.
The program was originally founded by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard as a transparent system of data collection for schools.
Mr Elliott said one option was reducing the national, all-student test to a sample size test, to help reduce the intense scrutiny on NAPLAN results for individual children, schools and teachers.
A sample size test would also reduce the amount of time and anxiety consumed by the NAPLAN test each year, Mr Elliott said.
However Professor Natalie Brown, director of the Peter Underwood Centre, said while a sample size test might be of benefit for weighing up Australia’s overall results against international results, the role of NAPLAN was to provide individual reports on student and school performance.
“It depends on what the purpose of NAPLAN is,” Professor Brown said.
“If the purpose is for individual school programs, then every student does need to do [the tests].
“If it’s used to benchmark us to other countries, perhaps it’s not the right test for that.”
Professor Brown said she supported a review of NAPLAN to ensure it was acting as a diagnostic tool for teacher and schools to improve and develop their numeracy and literacy results.
She said it was important people understood what the data publicly released on the My School website meant, and how it should be interpreted.
Australian Education Union Tasmania president Helen Richardson said the federal union had been urging a review of NAPLAN for some time.
She said the 10-year anniversary was a good opportunity to reassess “if it’s serving its purpose” as a diagnostic tool, rather than unintentionally becoming a school ranking system for parents and children.