Alarm at ‘ dumbed down’ NAPLAN
HIGH school students are being asked to analyse text message chats with emojis instead of literary texts in practice NAPLAN online exams, sparking concerns the flagship literacy assessment is being dumbed down.
The Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has posted a series of public demonstration “mini- tests” ahead of its transition to online NAPLAN testing this year, so students and teachers can become familiar with the new digital format.
But the Year 9 reading test is already causing alarm because it asks 14 and 15- yearold students to answer a series of basic comprehension questions in response to a screenshot of text message conversation about a drama teacher’s facial hair.
Teenage students are asked to answer four multiple choice questions about the text including who sent the first message and whether “mo” refers to Mr Grigg’s moustache.
The NAPLAN online website says the sample tests contain questions that will be “similar to the NAPLAN Online 2017 tests”.
A spokeswoman for the curriculum authority defended the choice of a text message conversation as an appropriate text type for high school students to analyse.
“The NAPLAN Online demonstration site includes a range of reading text types ( or stimuli) from traditional to contemporary consistent with the Australian Curriculum, which expects students to be able to analyse, interpret and evaluate a wide range of texts in context including various types of authentic media texts, such as newspapers, film and digital texts,” she said.
But Kevin Donnelly, a senior research fellow with the Australian Catholic University, slammed the practice NAPLAN test as “very unsophisticated” and more suited to kids in lower to middle primary school.
“The bar is set so low that it is giving students, teachers and parents a false sense of the standards,” Dr Donnelly said.
“By Year 9 I would expect that rather than having a very simplistic, superficial text as this one, there would be more focus on students being able to read more literary works, whether it is an extract, or poem, or prose, where they are asked to infer and deduce more high- order skills,” he said.
Fiona Laing, the president of the English Teachers Association of Queensland, also criticised the text choice as strange.
“If you are trying to assess how kids are going in their school progress, it is just a slightly odd choice to make: a fake adult version of how kids text,” she said.
Jennifer Buckingham from the Centre for independent Studies said it was important students were able to understand and interpret informal communication.