If not NAPLAN, then how do we help students do their best?

John Mula says that standardised testing is being reconsidered around the world

NEXT week, students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 across Australia undertake NAPLAN testing. This year’s testing marks the start of the second decade of national assessment, which was first introduced in 2008.

Despite NAPLAN testing now well entrenched in the Australian education calendar, over the past few months it would seem our fascination with standardised educational measurement is waning.

Recent commentary suggests Australia’s literacy and numeracy results measured through NAPLAN have stagnated and, as a consequence, there seems to be growing ambivalence to this type of testing among staff, parents and students.

Perhaps some of the stagnation in results can be attributed to this growing ambivalence to national testing with staff, students and parents seeing the May NAPLAN testing as a distraction to the learning process rather than a support.

What seems plainly obvious is that standardised educational measurement linked to national and school accountability has not shown the improvements expected.

Countries across the globe have recognised this, most recently in New Zealand.

Late last year, the New Zealand Prime Minister announced that the national testing program was to cease.

Instead of holding schools and teachers to account for students’ performance the Government was backing its teachers’ professional judgment.

Ten years on, my issues with NAPLAN remain relatively unchanged.

The original intent of NAPLAN was to provide teachers with a diagnostic to support student learning.

In reality, NAPLAN in its current form has reduced the effectiveness of our education system to a set of numbers and graphs. It pays scant regard to something very important in education, that is, that it involves interaction between human beings. Secondly, NAPLAN and similar standardised testing reinforces a 19th century model of education, which sees teaching as the delivery of information and limits learning to incremental steps.

If not NAPLAN, what should we do to appropriately enhance student learning and support teachers to help students reach their potential and even surpass what they believe they are capable?

Rather than fixing our attention on incremental improvement, as educators and as a community, we need to focus more on the horizon and look for “step change” with ambitious goals and a long-term vision for the future.

This need for step change is not unlike what was proposed in David Gonski’s Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools.

So what does step change look like? To have that conversation, we first need to depoliticise education and education policymaking. Our students do not deserve educational policy shaped by

political opportunism and media commentary. The education profession needs to reclaim the policymaking space.

In critiquing the value of NAPLAN testing, I am not advocating our system ceases student assessment. Students and teachers need assessments to provide constructive feedback. This feedback, referred to as formative assessment, provides students with insight into where they are in their learning and where they need to go, and shows teachers how effective they are in supporting learning.

Therefore I see the second aspect of step change to be providing real-time formative assessment in the classroom.

My hope is that the time and effort allocated to the new NAPLAN online testing regimen can evolve into a tool for teachers and students to provide this feedback.

My final suggestion on this step change is to view our curriculum in a more holistic way. Our world does not organise itself into discrete disciplines so why do our schools? Our curriculum needs to be rigorous but not rigid. It needs to recognise that today’s learners are not empty vessels to be filled. Our goal as educators is to support and challenge the inquiring mind, not contain it within artificial constraints.

What is crucial to improve students’ outcomes is the quality of the teaching and the learning in the classroom. Our goal, as educators and parents, is not to help students to achieve their potential but to exceed what they believe to be their potential. John Mula is executive director of Catholic Education in Tasmania.

In reality, NAPLAN in its current form has reduced the effectiveness of our education system to a set of numbers and graphs. Our curriculum needs to be rigorous but not rigid.