Sophie – Speech

NAPLAN IN RECENT YEARS & ONLINE

Recently, new formats have been developed for national monitoring processes in the form of online
tests rather than pencil & paper tests. However, with advances in technology, it creates additional
issues.
• It has been noted that there is a trend of students with higher socioeconomic status are
achieving better results than those of a lower socioeconomic status- could this at all be
related to the testing being in an online format?
• Perhaps these students are more familiar with technology, creating additional stress and
anxiety for those students of a lower socioeconomic status who may not have regular access
to computers.
• ACARA are currently grappling these issues with trials of new formats. If online testing
impacts the outcomes of assessment then it needs to be clearly identified and steps must be
taken to remedy any negative effects online assessment might have.
There are positives for NAPLAN being online including:
• Assessments are more efficient in terms of costs and administration & allows results to be
delivered back to schools quicker.
• NAPLAN can be used to diagnose individual literacy problems
• Data can be used for whole schools to reflect together and identify school-level problems
(Dooner, 2011).
• Curriculum sequence and teaching strategies could be better utilised once student
performance on particular tasks is understood.

THE FUTURE
The future of Australian education needs to be one in which the reason for such large scale testing
outweighs instrumental, political and commercial interests. With multiple mock assessments and
model answers available online, it is of concern that it can be ‘overdone’ for students and that
testing for the sake of testing may fail to enhance the learning of Australian students.

Individual assessments that can measure improvement for each student rather than monitoring
student progress will likely take the place of standardised national assessments against artificial
benchmarks. This would be a marked change in monitoring student progress but potentially one that
teachers may feel more comfortable with, considering this is what they do on a daily basis.