NAPLAN: a rigorous process for developing and trialling tasks

This year’s NAPLAN results showed a slight downward trend in persuasive writing. Robert Randall, CEO of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), puts these results into perspective and looks to the future of NAPLAN.

Children are every nation’s future. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, (ACARA) is committed to working towards a better educational future, one where all young Australians have access to a world-class school curriculum, and world-class assessment and reporting systems. Education is an empowering force in a child’s life and has the power to change the course of a child’s life.

As a national education authority, ACARA has a vital role to play in shifting the conversations about education from local and state-based to a national level. The task of deciding what is essential content to be learned and assessed as our children progress through schooling is a challenging one. It’s ACARA’s role to set the national expectations and clarity around this for Australian schools.

Students do not sit NAPLAN tests to improve their literacy and numeracy skills and understandings.  Rather, students sit these tests so we know how they are progressing in the development of these skills at specific times across their schooling life. We know that illiteracy and poor numeracy are high stakes and that young people who do not develop proficiency in these areas will have their educational and life choices limited.

NAPLAN is a measurement tool that should be used to inform school/system improvement. NAPLAN gives us data at an individual, school, state/territory and national level. The data allows schools, state and territory and national governments to identify students’ strengths and areas for improvement in literacy and numeracy. NAPLAN data are also used by policy makers to assist in understanding achievement towards various policy goals.

ACARA releases NAPLAN summary information each year. The summary information release provides nationally comparable data for the 2014 national and state/territory results for each year level (3, 5, 7 and 9) and for each test domain (reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, and numeracy). It also gives comparisons of national and state/territory achievement in each year and test domain between 2008 (2011 for persuasive writing) to 2014 and 2012 to 2014.

As each new year of NAPLAN data is added, readers of NAPLAN reports have a more useful picture of large-scale (state/territory and national levels) NAPLAN performance trends over time.

In 2010, ACARA assumed responsibility for NAPLAN, which was developed with a single writing prompt for all year levels.

In 2014, the NAPLAN summary information identified a slight downward trend in persuasive writing results. When we look at the results in writing since 2011, we can identify different patterns in results across students in different year levels. We can see that the writing results sometimes affect more students in years 7 and 9 and sometimes, as is the case this year, affecting more students in years 3 and 5. This pattern of results provides an indication that students at different year levels engage with persuasive tasks in different ways. ACARA considers that potentially offering multiple writing prompts would better suit the abilities of students.

The slight decline in writing results may be attributed to a few factors.

Firstly, ACARA acknowledges that this year, there may be some “task effect” in the results. By “task effect” we mean that the task appeared to work differently for some years of students than others.

Secondly, in 2014 we made a process change. Up until this year, teacher, students and parents were told the genre of the writing assessment. From 2008 – 2010, the genre to be tested was narrative and from 2011 to 2013, the genre was persuasive. In the past, it may have been that the specific genre to be tested became the focus of teaching and learning programs in the lead up to NAPLAN.

This year ACARA did not disclose the type of text that was going to be the focus of the writing assessment.

Despite the slight decline in writing this year it is a better educational outcome for students to be taught both narrative and persuasive writing techniques.

ACARA has a rigorous process for developing and trialling tasks which includes trials across all year levels. And the prompt that we chose to use this year did meet our exacting our trial requirements, however the summary information showed up matters in the full cohort data that were not evident in the trial data.

Improvements for the NAPLAN writing task into the future may include different prompts for years 3 and 5 and years 7 and 9 and potentially different text types in each year level, randomly allocated by school or by student

For NAPLAN generally, improvements will include linking NAPLAN to the Australian Curriculum from 2016. To support this ACARA is developing an assessment framework that will clearly articulate which elements of the Australian Curriculum: English and Mathematics will be the subject of assessment through NAPLAN.

ACARA is continuing to work with states and territories to move assessment online. This will deliver significant benefits that include:

• tailoring of tests to students ability to better meet the full range of student ability
• significantly reducing time for providing feedback on student performance to students, teachers, and parents.