Over the last few weeks I have had several conversations with a good friend about her 8 yr old daughter. The first conversation was about the child’s distress that the only feedback she had received about her last piece of writing (a NAPLAN practice) was that the class as a whole had not done very well. The child fretted that she did not know what she needed to do better. The second conversation was that the class next door had been doing a lot of practice and she was worried that her class was not going to do as well. The third conversation was today. This usually bubbly little person was unhappy about returning to school last week because NAPLAN was going to be soon. What are we doing to our kids?
When Ken Boston (former hard core Director General of Education for NSW) stated that based on his recent experience in England, this type of high stakes testing “sucks the oxygen out of the classroom” , alarms bells should have gone off. Another observation has been from a teacher training institution, that sending student teachers into schools in Term 1 is now a waste of time as all the student teachers see is test prep and from beginning teachers I have heard such nonsense as ‘we have to do spelling for an hour a day to improve our scores’. We have lost the plot!
The Basic Skills Test (before NAPLAN) used to be a diagnostic test that provided the school with valuable information to review its teaching programs and to inform planning at regional and state level. That changed with the publication of league tables in daily papers and the comparison of schools on a single data set.
NAPLAN doesn’t measure what most parents value about their children; NAPLAN tells us what we already know – socioeconomically disadvantaged and indigenous students do not do as well; NAPLAN sells newspapers!
So for Holly – it is just another day with some special coloured paper to write on to make it a little more interesting. Your parents think you are the greatest kid in the world and no stupid NAPLAN result is going to change their minds.
Last year my now 9 year old daughter did her NAPLAN test. I am a HomeTutor at a Qld School of Distance Education and we did NAPLAN via correspondence. On the day of the test we phoned in for a test…the first my daughter had ever done….she was very nervous because it was a test…she likes to do well, as most of us do.
The teacher talked through the requirements and then they all signed off to complete their tests alone. I sat in the schoolroom for the required time watching my daughter work. Her time management was OK simply because I had been using it to help her do tasks alone so I could work with my other child. She did her writing task…persuasive writing, she had been working on it all through Term 1 and into Term 2. The test days were on Thursday and Friday on Monday of that week we had started a new unit of work…creative writing. My daughter was and is very good with her writing but she loves creative writing…she was asked to write so her argument for her writing became the most wonderful creative writing piece. I was horrified. It stressed me no end. Her reading seemed to be OK. She did not finish her maths, one answer she wrote….”I have not been taught this so how can I answer it”…fair point.
I found it most stressful having to watch my daughter work her way through her first test. I looked at the Reading and Comprehension…she had prior knowledge on every article…she has had many experiences and watched many documentaries with her parents…she was lucky.
She did very well in her NAPLAN test. Her reading was in the top bracket 100%. Her creative writing piece which had not a single element of persuasive writing about it put her in the top end of band 5 (6 bands in total) her spelling was top of Band 4 her Grammar and Punctuation was in Band 6 her Numeracy was middle band 4. For her numeracy she got everything correct but did not finish the paper and wrote a rude comment about not being taught things, so how could she possibly do the question.
NAPLAN was far more stressful for me than her, as parents you do not normally have to watch your child do their tests. I was amazed by her results and could not believe her creative piece of writing did so well…nothing persuasive about it. She did the test and did not ask about it again. I got her results and all it made me realise was just how stressful it all is for students, teachers and schools and yet everyone around me was saying it really is not important. Then why do it?
We had two school days taken up with NAPLAN tests and we did not gain anything other than I will not stress about her creative writing again. She writes beautifully and can write an incredibly well structured persuasive text when she needs to…just not on test day. She did OK…English is her first language, she comes from a middle class educated family and her life experiences for someone her age are broad. Of course she is going to do OK. NAPLAN is a waste of time.