10 December 2012
OPINION
Chris Watt
Federal Secretary
Independent Education Union
The Independent Education Union welcomes an online format for NAPLAN by 2016, but nevertheless believes there is a need further for a critical reassessment of the aims and execution of the national testing regime.
The Federal and State Education Minister’s meeting last Friday provided a genuine opportunity to clarify the role and purpose of NAPLAN, within the National Assessment Program.
One of the key benefits of NAPLAN argued by those extolling the current arrangements has been the capacity to direct specific funding for teacher professional development in schools identified as underperforming.
This funding has been provided through National Partnerships projects. Yet it is worth noting that those national partnerships end shortly and in the current school funding review negotiations, these funds will likely be rolled into the new formula for per capita funding and will no longer be able to be an “attribute” of the assessment regime.
Teachers, principals and interest groups have received from NAPLAN crusaders two contradictory points of view in relation to the testing regime’s true function and ultimate ambition.
Addressing a senate estimates hearing in October 2010, former ACARA chief executive officer Peter Hill rejected the idea the national testing regime was, or ever intended to be, a tool for diagnostic assessment.
He said: “The purpose of national testing has been to get a snapshot of student performance for reporting back at different levels. That was the purpose from the beginning, and the purpose has never been diagnostic assessment.’’
The former CEO’s assessment of NAPLAN as non-diagnostic seems contradictory,
given a system of national testing acts, at least in part, as an instrument of large-scale diagnosis and analysis. Obtaining a national picture of student performance across social indicators of sex, location, parental background and Indigenous status for the purposes of identifying problem areas and measuring improvement is a practice with diagnostic function as its lynchpin.
Currently the national testing regime is viewed as a diagnostic tool – attracting bipartisan support on this basis from both sides of politics.
From its inception in 2008, the Independent Education Union of Australia has supported NAPLAN testing on similar foundations, despite having concerns about the overall benefits of mass standardised testing.
The purpose of assessment and reporting is to provide meaningful information so as to improve student learning.
The provision of proper diagnostic configuration by means of an online test will provide immediate feedback for teaching and learning purposes. For NAPLAN to be genuinely diagnostic, testing must be carried out in a range of different ways including more strategic timing and faster return of information.
As an online package, NAPLAN has the potential to establish itself as genuinely diagnostic both for individual students, and for teachers, the people who are tasked with providing the critical foundation for student’s positive and rewarding future community participation.
Notwithstanding the benefits of an online NAPLAN model, the National Assessment Program needs further reconfiguration. By providing a national report via sampling, replacing the national testing format that is NAPLAN, to be taken by every child within selected target groups, every-year.
Sampling could instead be used successfully and effectively to identify key improvement areas, as evidenced by PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, a study which evaluates worldwide education systems by assessing basic skills competencies through sampling.
The IEU does not believe that a single instrument, NAPLAN, can simultaneously deliver on individual diagnosis, school benchmarking, transparency of performance to community, identification of areas for targeted funding and public reporting. Indeed some of these will continue to remain contradictory and problematic.
The conversion to online testing is a first step in a necessary overhaul of the National Assessment Program.