Tasmanian students are attaining reasonably high results in grade 3 national numeracy and literacy tests, but grade 9 students are still showing a significant lag, reflecting national trends.
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The National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy 2017 report was released on Wednesday and showed while Tasmania’s female students are doing consistently better than their male peers in most areas, overall the results remain low.
Students across Tasmania took the NAPLAN tests in May this year.
Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham described the national results as a “mixed bag”, with pockets of improvement but ultimately a lack of consistency.
Senator Birmingham said the stagnation of results was concerning.
While questions are always raised around the relevance and value of NAPLAN testing, which puts grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 students through their paces, those questions may increase with the 2017 report showing a steady decrease in participation since 2008.23
The general withdrawal rate of students nationally has continued to increase since 2012.
Tasmania’s results emphasised the impact of parents’ education on the future of their children. Children whose parents have a degree-level education score well above their peers whose parents have less qualifications.
For grade 3 pupils, there is an 8.1 percentage gap between those with degree-qualified parents and those with parents who have attained grade 11 or below.
That gap increases for grade 9 students, seeing a massive 28.3 per cent gap in grammar results between students with degree-qualified parents, and those with parents who have attained grade 11 or below.
Across all four cohorts tested, grade 9 students showed the worst results with just 75.9 per cent of students tested attaining the minimum standard in writing – however, grade 9 students showed stronger numeracy results with 95.4 per cent attaining the minimum.
Grade 3 pupils showed the strongest results overall, with 96.2 per cent of pupils tested in numeracy attaining the minimum standard.
Education Minister Jeremy Rockliff said the results of 25,000 Tasmanian students showed the high performance of female students, who consistently met or exceeded the minimum across all literacy tests and grades.
Mr Rockliff noted Tasmania’s strength in reading scores, and the strong performance of Tasmania’s Indigenous students, who had higher mean scores across all grades and tests compared to their national peers.
“Results statistically are comparable with 2016 for all year levels and assessments,” Mr Rockliff said.