Last year, my son sat his Year three NAPLAN for the first time. Like so many things on the school calendar it just snuck up on me and before I could really protest it, it was here. I had put my objections to the test on the public record but that was my opinion of it, not my son’s so I let him decide whether to sit it or not.
His view was clear – “That’s not fair on everybody else if I don’t do it.”
He’s right.
The more students who sit NAPLAN in Years three, five, seven and nine, the more robust the assessment of critical literacy and numeracy life skills for individual students, schools, and communities as well as at a state and national level. NAPLAN exists to identify students who need extra support in getting their literacy and numeracy core skills up to speed as well as those students needing more challenges to keep growing into their potential.
Now as I stated I haven’t always been a fan however I never expected the actual test would change my mind rather than my son’s experience of it.
I’m an active parent. I have active conversations with my son’s teacher right throughout the year. Education isn’t passive from this parent’s perspective. While I was getting great comments from the teacher, that feedback wasn’t reflected in the report card that came home. The report card showed a student nowhere near the level that I knew he was capable of.
Then he sat NAPLAN.
Is NAPLAN stressful or should kids harden up? Each year, parents complain about the stress NAPLAN puts their kids under, but is stress an important emotion to make kids familiar with? The Mamamia Out Loud team discuss. Post continues after audio.
His results were off the chart - literally - and reflected the capabilities that I knew he had.
The independent assessment provided through NAPLAN meant I could go back to his school and his teacher. Their initial response was, “Wow, we were surprised by his results.” It became their “a-ha!” moment and it allowed us to talk openly about the way they were tracking my son’s progress. In fact, it was such a powerful tool that I’m now getting independent testing for the years when he’s not sitting NAPLAN.
NAPLAN gave us independent, objective markers about our child’s learning which are so beneficial. The bench-marking it provides against other students from similar backgrounds as well as on a national basis is a powerful and important reference for me as a parent.
While NAPLAN is the only national, independent benchmark we have of how our children are progressing against their peers it also allows us as a school community to check in too. Sure, it’s just one part of the total assessment of a child but, given literacy and numeracy form the spine of the education journey, we need to objectively and independently track progress.
Is NAPLAN the be-all-and-end-all? Absolutely not, but then again it was never meant to be that. NAPLAN tracks progress in the core literacy and numeracy skills taught every hour, every day in classrooms across the country.
Top Comments
Naplan is a good way for students to experience formal exams with time limits. It can help them get used to exam conditions, which they will have to undergo throughout their education. Not only that, but life (especially the world of work) has a lot of competitive and selective situations. All this experience as children are growing up, can help them try to achieve better results in school, and life situations. This can help create more hardworking, ambitious individuals, who can better contribute to society. Unfortunately, in Australia, too many people think they can just 'opt out', or 'give up' if things are hard or challenging. That's why there are too many slack individuals, and could explain why our education system is ranked 39th out of 41 countries with regard to education quality and levels of proficiency. All those soft parents who complain that "Naplan is putting too much stress on my baby..." need to think about what kind of individual they are raising. Maybe they should have encouraged their child to have a regular study schedule at home instead of just letting them play computer games, then the child would have no problem in the Naplan tests, as they are not so hard. Any tool, which encourages children to learn and rise to a challenge should be encouraged.
I agree whole-heartedly. NAPLAN has an important role it can fulfill. Do I buy that it is stressful for students? Not really. With so much controversy, the detractors have done more to make this stressful than anything the test requirements could have done to students.