Last week I supervised the college’s National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy, NAPLAN. It makes some teachers shudder and some students break out in a sweat.
As a teacher, I believe assessment is necessary. It’s necessary to support the ability of teachers to focus on areas of need and to help parents see how their child is progressing.
But is NAPLAN the tool that really does that?
Below are some points taken from an article on the blog of education consultant and author, David Hornsby. In my opinion the points validate why NAPLAN isn’t a one size fits all assessment.
This is why:
1. It focuses on scores
Dr Stanley Rabinowitz, assessment and reporting general manager from the organisation that runs NAPLAN (the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, ACARA), said that there is too much focus on scores.
So many teachers, as well as parents, focus on getting those few pieces of paper at the end of the day and seeing how their child measures up. Some parents will even send their children to specific NAPLAN tutoring to prepare them for the exams.
That’s not measuring learning – that’s tutoring your child on how to score well in an exam.
ACARA has warned colleges not to conduct “NAPLAN boot camps” and cramming sessions. Yet that’s exactly what happens.
Schools exist that spend months and months of class time teaching students how to divide their time equally between sections, how to read the questions and deduce the correct answer. Even how to shade the bubble correctly.
How can we be certain that ALL students have this level of support? We can’t. And that’s why results are skewed to begin with.
And then you have colleges that are asking some students to stay home, to enhance the college’s overall results.
3. It plays colleges off against each other
I’m sure you’ve heard of a website called My School. What I’m even surer of is that you looked up how your college weighed up against one down the road. And where does all of the data on My School come from? NAPLAN. So anyone in the whole world can log onto that site and see how the entire student population measures up.
I’m all for parents having information to facilitate choosing the best college for their child. What I’m not for is colleges being pitted against each other, to get their college-wide results up so that they can have a higher rate of student enrolments when compared to the college one kilometre down the road. And they do this by asking certain students (those who won’t score highly) to stay home.
In saying that, our college does not place the same amount of emphasis as some other colleges may do on a 3 day assessment program. We don’t prep our students for NAPLAN by teaching to a test. We ask them to do their best.
We are trying to teach them valuable and necessary life skills and to reach their individual learning and sporting goals.
There are strong arguments for and against which way is right. But if we are trying to teach students that the only person they have to compete with is themselves, to make themselves better – why have a one size fits all standardised test?
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