Australia Association for Research in Education
NAPLAN
It’s time to be honest with parents about NAPLAN: your child’s report is misleading, here’s how
You know there is something going wrong with Australia’s national testing program when the education minister of the largest state calls for it to be axed. The testing program, which started today across the nation, should be urgently dumped according to NSW Education Minister, Rob Stokes, because it is being “used dishonestly as a school …
NAPLAN testing begins for 2018 and here’s what our children think about it
Australia’s national literacy and numeracy testing program, NAPLAN, for 2018 begins today, on Tuesday 15th May. Classrooms have …
Learning to write should not be hijacked by NAPLAN: New research shows what is really going on
You couldn’t miss the headlines and page one stories across Australia recently about the decline of Australian children’s writing skills. The release of results of national tests in literacy and numeracy meant we were treated to a range of colour-coded tables and various info graphics that highlighted ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ and that dire, downward trend. …
The dark side of NAPLAN: it’s not just a benign ‘snapshot’
The release of the latest NAPLAN results this week identified a problem with student performance in writing. This …
This is what primary school children think about NAPLAN
There are no obvious consequences for poor National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) performance by individual children. So the notion that children should not be too stressed about doing the tests is not uncommon. However, as I see it, the idea that NAPLAN is a low-stakes test is an adult idea. It imposes an …
Dump NAPLAN stress: here’s a better way to do our national literacy and numeracy testing
We need to reform our national assessment program as a matter of urgency. Anyone who has stepped into …
NAPLAN and edu-business: the commercialisation of schooling in Australia
NAPLAN testing is orchestrating a high-stakes environment in Australian schools where schools, teachers, students and even parents feel the pressure to perform and do well. Edu-businesses are capitalising on this high-stakes environment for commercial advantage. Schools and governments now purchase products and services that are explicitly tied to test development and preparation, data analysis and …
Ken Wiltshire: Pyne needs to do his job and fix these 3 emerging problems with schooling
Federal Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, seems distracted by other political events as some disturbing developments emerge in Australian …
Our obsession with school achievement data is misplaced: we’re measuring the wrong things.
In 2008 Australia began a national assessment program that tests school children in Years 3, 5, 7 and …
Australia’s most disadvantaged children invisible in official NAPLAN results
It seems simple enough. The idea behind the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing program …