Testing 3, 2, 1. Michael Lawrence

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СКАЧАТЬ help but wonder, ‘How many of you have experienced similar moments with English and science (the other subjects tested in NAPLAN)?’

      The nature of the NAPLAN test is that it presents progressively more difficult problems for the child to solve, until they eventually can go no further with that particular activity.

Children of this age naturally assume that if the problem is on the test, then there is an expectation that they will be able to do it. And they certainly want to please the adults, don’t they? Those who raised their hands were not the rebellious students, they were mainly girls—good students who are (and certainly were at the time of sitting the test) very keen to please their parents and teachers.2

      They trust, or at least trusted, adults and teachers unconditionally.

      Finnish teachers asked me why Australian teachers let this happen to our students. It is a major discussion. How to explain why so much autonomy has been taken away from teachers (and also from administrators)? However, thinking about the obvious damage done to many young children forced to sit NAPLAN examinations, it is clear that if teachers do not speak up for the children, no-one else will. The companies that prepare the tests make many millions of dollars from them; we won’t be hearing much criticism from that corner. The states themselves and school principals are reluctant to be seen as unsupportive, hence they are called out as trying to hide ‘poor performance’ and end up losing students and funding.

      So who is looking at the tests and asking if they are in the best interests of the students?

      In defence of teachers, when NAPLAN was first introduced it was not deemed a ‘high stakes test’. Phrases such as ‘a snapshot’ and ‘an indicator’ were bandied about, the point being that teachers were not aware that what they were introducing could become a stress-inducing test which could alter for the rest of their lives students’ attitudes to vitally important school subjects.

      One does not have to be in Finnish schools for long to understand that educators there are true professionals. They are trusted to devise the required curriculum; national curriculum guidelines are minimal and there is no ‘inspection’ associated with this. Teachers are expected to devise all forms of assessment; there is no standardised testing whatsoever.

      The education union is the professional body and membership is around 95 percent. It is involved in all aspects of education.

      A recent report in the UK’s Guardian newspaper spoke of the flood of interest in Finland’s education system: every year hundreds of delegations comprising teachers and policymakers from all over the world pour into Helsinki to see this nirvana for themselves.

      So popular has it become that international visits are strictly regulated and have to be paid for: a presentation costs €682 (£588 as at November 2019) per hour and a school visit €1240. (Weale, 2019)

      Back in Tampere, I did not dare mention that the school I work at (like most other secondary schools) also has two rounds of examinations (on top of the NAPLAN ones in years 7 and 9) in each of years 9, 10 and 11, meaning students sit no fewer than 12 rounds (each ‘round’ could be a period of up to two or three weeks comprising examinations and study time preparing and revising for the big day) of examinations from grade 3 through to year 12.

      And I nearly forgot the AGAT (the ACER General Ability Test, ACER being the Australian Council for Educational Research). This is designed to help teachers assess learning potential and aptitude in years 2 to 10. Finland makes do with only the final matriculation exam.

      ‘Does it work?’ they asked, unable to suppress their shock.

      The answer was a simple ‘No.’

      ‘Well, why do they do it? Why does the teacher allow the students to do it?’

      The last question really hit home. There is no reasonable answer other than to say that this is the way we have always—well, at least for the last decade and a half—done things, which seemed terribly inappropriate even as the words left my mouth. I wanted to be able to say that when the test helps us to identify students who have a weakness in their learning we are then able to provide suitable support to enable them to overcome this and continue succeeding in their education.

      But this would have been a lie.

      The truth is that when weaknesses are identified through NAPLAN testing there is no set policy for addressing the issue. In fact, we (well, the My School website) will encourage parents to remove their sons and daughters from the poorly performing schools (or not to send them there at all) by making the schools’ results public.

      The suggestion appears to be that the resultant drop in student numbers and public shaming will somehow encourage the poorer-performing schools to ‘lift their game’. That school funding is based on student numbers ensures that the poorer-performing school will also be punished financially. Parents in a position to move their children will do so, but what of those who cannot afford the money or time to relocate them to a more distant school? They remain in a classroom where many of their peers have also not done so well on the NAPLAN test.

      In a school whose funding has been cut and whose better teachers are probably feeling somewhat disillusioned by all of the above, they—like the better-off parents—will be looking out for another school if possible.

      If there is little to be gained by students in the NAPLAN test, then how do their teachers and principals fare? One can only imagine the stress of being principal at a school with the lowest NAPLAN score in its town or city.

      Public shaming, likely loss of student numbers and funding, parent responses and students (not to mention their school) labelled the ‘worst’ in town. All for a standardised testing system that really does no favours for the students, who are almost certainly from the most disadvantaged part of town. Feeling somewhat guilty, I stayed silent on the fact that not only were we administering world record numbers of tests, but we were also teaching towards these tests, making their content the curriculum and judging the merits of entire schools, teachers, principals and individual students according to the results they yield.

      Teachers in Australia are trained in the ‘mandatory reporting’ of anything resembling child abuse in any form. How could we have done this to so many thousands of students?

      How many students and adults now loathe mathematics, science or English (perhaps there is a bright side to the fact that NAPLAN omits the arts!) because of early NAPLAN experiences? If the one third of the class I asked the question to are indicative, we are talking many thousands of students.

      I have often compared the obsession with increased NAPLAN-styled testing to presuming you could change the temperature by looking at the thermometer more frequently.

      The discussion rarely turns to why we should expect improvement. Indeed, the only logical reason to expect any is that schools are now teaching for the NAPLAN tests, effectively making them the curriculum (at the expense of many far more useful faculties such as creativity). The fact that results are still not improving should be a cause for further concern.

      According to a study published in the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy reporting a survey of more than 200 year 7 and 9 teachers across NSW in 2017, ‘nearly 60 percent disagreed with the statement that NAPLAN provides important information on the literacy skills of students’.

      ‘NAPLAN’s out of control,’ said Chris Presland, president of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council: ‘The problem with it goes beyond teaching to the test, there’s certainly an over-obsession with data and pressure on schools to perform because of the comparative nature СКАЧАТЬ