A week after the NSW Government announced a complete overhaul of public school curriculums, around one million students have sat the tenth year of NAPLAN exams this week.
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NAPLAN, the National Assessment Plan, Literacy and Numeracy, is just that, a marker to assess each school and region on where they stand, with the tests taken by years three, five, seven and nine with each domain scored on a single scale.
While many have come out in support of the program, first introduced by then Education Minister Julia Gillard in 2008, others, including the NSW Teachers Union.
A recent study commissioned by the Federation and carried out by Les Perelman, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found the tests placed too much emphasis on spelling, punctuation, grammar and paragraphing at the expense of “higher order writing skills”.
“It’s the worst one of the 10 or 12 international tests that I have studied in depth,” he said.
“It is the most absurd and the least valid of any test that I've seen.”
“The students get more points for spelling than critical thinking – it is irrelevant and powerless, but there is an obsession with NAPLAN data,” she said.
Meanwhile the Centre for Independent Studies (CiS) concluded that NAPLAN is “accurate and valuable.” Author of the study Blaise Joseph said that studies into the negative impact of Naplan “are inconclusive.”
He also named three key benefits as it being a valuable tool to improve schools and teaching, whilst providing transparency and accountability.
"NAPLAN provides valuable data to show which students are falling behind. It also identifies problems in the system," he said.
"It provides transparency and accountability for the $50 billion of taxpayer money going into schools.”