Practical issues block path to online NAPLAN

The Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne recently announced that $24.7 million is being committed to the construction of a national platform enabling online NAPLAN testing across Australian schools by 2016.

At the time, I was attending the Southern Queensland Area Council in Toowoomba, and members quickly came up with several reasons why this could be problematic.

These are some their concerns and those of many of our teacher and principal members.

• Access to enough working desktop or keyboard connected computers/laptops (touch screen devices are not considered suitable for the tests format) could be an issue. Many primary schools don’t have computer labs and have just three or four computers per classroom. With secondary schools having one third of their students doing NAPLAN, will their computer labs or laptops be able to cope?
• Will schools have access to enough bandwidth to allow the tests to be delivered at the needed internet speed?
• It could encourage student disregard for careful reading of the tasks – a number of our members have told me that when it comes to PAT(M )and PAT( R ) online tests, students frequently race through to finish first or to get the task done, with little regard for accuracy. Will those same students race through NAPLAN online?

Of course, if Queensland is to face these basic challenges, so too will schools in all other states and territories, some of which have yet to match Queensland’s levels of ICT and broadband access. Without extensive upgrading of school internet services to all Australian schools, it’s hard to see how NAPLAN can go online in 2016.

Mr Pyne suggests that moving these tests online will make them more diagnostic. However, no matter what federal or state Education Ministers may believe, NAPLAN is not and was never designed to be diagnostic.

Diagnostic testing tells the teacher why the student is “underperforming” in, say, comprehension. NAPLAN tells the teacher, the parent , the HOC, the HOD, the principal or media commentators what item the students at a particular school had difficulty with. It shows which items the student got right or wrong, but not why.

Perhaps politicians (of different political parties) cling to the idea that they are diagnostic to excuse the great stress and concern they cause students and parents. But high stakes tests will always do this.

The Federal Minister claims that moving NAPLAN online will deliver benefits to students, teachers and parents. This is debatable. I certainly doubt that our year 3, 5, 7 or 9 students will get much out of it. Maybe getting NAPLAN results sooner will be of some use to schools and parents? Perhaps. But then again, how will the writing task be assessed?

Mr Pyne’s media release says that putting the NAPLAN testing online will end teaching to the test. But with everything in a school depending on its NAPLAN results, that just isn’t realistic.

He, like many others, has missed the point. Teaching to the test does not mean that teachers are drilling students on the questions and answers – how could they, when teachers only see the NAPLAN papers when the students do. It does mean that teachers are forced to devote an increasingly large amount of class time to the learning areas that will be tested, to the detriment of other learning areas and class activities. They have to – they know their schools will be judged on the results.

Julie Brown
Vice-President

Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 119 No 8, 14 November 2014, p14