Looking at most of the news headlines concerning this year’s NAPLAN results, it’s clear to see why a sense of doom and gloom exists in the public narrative around student learning outcomes. However, on closer inspection, there is far more to celebrate than there is to criticise.
While the latest data shows student performance across Australia remaining steady compared to 2023, this is despite many educators and young people facing enormous mental health pressures that have only been worsening since the Covid-19 pandemic.
One study published in May this year by Sally Larsen, Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of New England, shows there have even been some considerable gains, particularly in Year 3 and Year 5 reading, where students achieved progress at the population level over the 14 years of NAPLAN to 2022.
What should we make of the latest NAPLAN data?
John Munro, Professor of educational psychology and exceptional learning with ACU’s School of Education, says getting a true picture of what the data really shows about student performance is proving difficult to interpret, due to the new scoring and reporting protocol and the use of the adaptive format.
He says many commentators and politicians who are not trained psychometricians have adopted the declining performance interpretation, and that the ’between groups’ interpretations of the 2024 data are more consistent and reliable.
“Some cohorts are preforming at a lower level than others. What these lower performances actually ‘look like’ in student knowledge or skill is less clear,” Professor Munro told The Educator. “Each student’s score is in one of four achievement categories. Until 2022 it was in one of 6 bands.”
The reporting protocol up to 2022 provided greater delineation of student outcomes, Professor Munro pointed out.
“Students who are now located in the ‘needs additional support’ category for example, would have been spread across more bands. Each category by necessity covers a broad range of skills,” he said.
Additionally, Professor Munro points out that until 2022, not only were students’ band scores known, but also the particular items in a domain the student answered correctly and incorrectly.
“Suppose a Year 3 student scores in the ‘needs additional support’ category in reading comprehension; we could analyse the particular items the student answered correctly and incorrectly and infer the specific skills the student had in place and those that they needed to learn,” he said. “The current reports do not give us this information.”
Professor Munro said it is not clear for each domain what the four achievement categories defined by their cut-off scores ‘look like’ in student outcomes.
“The usefulness of the NAPLAN tests for describing the performance of an individual student or a group is limited,” he said.
“Similarly, for students who are now located in the exceeding category were more finely distributed. A frequent observation of the data up to 2022 was that students with the highest learning potential were underachieving in our schools. The current data do not permit this finer-grained analysis.”
Phonics alone isn’t enough
The 2024 NAPLAN data highlighted areas needing improvement, particularly for students requiring additional support, including Indigenous students and those living in rural and remote areas.
When asked what he believes should be done at an education policy level to make a meaningful improvement for these students, Professor Munro said student performance in the various domains can be improved directly by teaching explicitly the skills need for learning in the domain, beginning always with what the student already knows.
“I’ll illustrate what I mean by applying it to improving reading comprehension,” he said. “This is based on key international evidence-based research that identifies the reading strategies students need to be taught explicitly, research that I led in 2000-2002 in the early years of schooling, research I led in 2011-12 with underachieving First Nations students in Victoria and work I did on the Tiwi Islands, Daly River and the Dampier Peninsula in 2014-16.”
Professor Munro said teaching phonics is “part of the answer”.
“To learn phonics, you may also need to teach the pre-requisite phonological and phonemic skills, and the skill to recall rapidly how to say groups of letters,” he said. “However, phonics is only part of the answer. It teaches students to say the words accurately [that is, ‘bark at print’] but doesn’t necessarily improve comprehension.”
Professor Munro said that to comprehend a written text, students first need to comprehend each sentence.
“You need to teach them explicitly to say its meaning in their own words and to visualise or act out what it says,” he said.
“Sentences differ in their complexity. For any student you need to begin by asking them to read sentences that match the complexity of the sentences they use when they speak and listen. The simplest sentences say a single action and who/what did it. Teaching students to speak in sentences is a pre-requisite.”
Professor Munro said educators much teach children explicitly to say, read, and write more complex sentences, and to link a sentence with the questions it answers.
“You teach them explicitly to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words in a sentence, and to check their meaning. This extends their vocabulary and helps them to teach themselves new vocabulary,” he said.
“You teach them how to say the main idea in a string of two or more sentences and to summarize them. For some students, you need to begin with two single-event sentences. You gradually increase the number of sentences and their complexity.”
Once students have summarised the string of sentences, says Professor Munro, they must then be taught explicitly to extend their understanding of the topic of the text.
“These strategies allow students to interpret a text and to use what it says. There is a lot of research that supports teaching these types of strategies explicitly, systematically and directly. However, they are often not taught explicitly because of the focus on phonics,” he said.
“You also need to teach students to see that reading comprehension works for them and that they can change or add to what they know by reading.”
Importantly, says Professor Munro, students need to see that they can be successful, that reading is useful for communicating with others and that it can engage their feelings and their imagination.
“They need to be encouraged to share what they have read with others, for example their parents. Parents and the community need to know that there are actions that can directly improve their children’s reading outcomes and that it is reasonable to expect schools to teach these,” he said.
“The research I led in 2011-12 with underachieving First Nations students over 6 months led to improvements of 2-3 years in some students’ reading comprehension.”
Is NAPLAN too narrow a measure of student success?
NAPLAN has long been criticised by some education experts as being too narrow a measure of student achievement, leading some to call for urgent changes and others for the test to be scrapped altogether.
In 2019, the Education Ministers of NSW, Queensland and South Australia announced a breakaway review of the test to address concerns that the test was unnecessarily stressful for students and teachers.
The aim of the review was to identify what a standardised testing regime in Australian schools should deliver, assess how well NAPLAN achieves this, and identify short and longer-term improvements that can be made.
In the years since, criticism that the test does not properly measure the full scope of student achievement at school has persisted, but Professor Munro says NAPLAN is serving the purpose for which it was created in the first place.
“The intended purposes of NAPLAN are to monitor students’ progress in literacy and numeracy, inform teaching, inform parents of their child’s progress, inform educational policy making and to compare outcomes across schools, regions, and the country, and to identify areas where improvements may be needed,” he said.
“To decide whether it is too narrow a measure of student success, you need to look at what it assesses, and how it does this and how the data are used. The skills that NAPLAN tasks assess are relevant to successful learning progress.”
Professor Munro points to NAPLAN reading as an example of this.
“NAPLAN reading assesses the ability to read a set of texts independently and to answer questions about them,” he said. To do this, students need to paraphrase what they read, work out the meanings of unfamiliar words, question what they read, link ideas across sentences and paragraphs, summarise and abstract the main ideas and themes in a text.”
Additionally, says Professor Munro, students need to predict and infer, synthesise, evaluate, compare and organise ideas.
“These are the skills that international meta-analyses identify as critical for reading comprehension,” he said. “You can make a similar analysis of the other NAPLAN tests. The types of skills they assess are important in an information-rich world.”
NAPLAN stress may stem from context, not the task itself
Professor Munro says the most desirable 21st Century skills equip individuals to convert, independently, written information to knowledge, to problem solve and to communicate more effectively.
“A criticism often made is that NAPLAN stresses some students. Stress is a reaction to a perceived threat,” he said. “Do my students experience high anxiety whenever they engage in reading comprehension tasks or is it only during NAPLAN?”
Professor Munro said if the latter is the case, it is not the reading comprehension task per se that is eliciting the anxiety but rather the context in which the test is embedded.
“I would suggest that the stress is caused, at least in part, by how the context is handled,” he said. “I have already noted that its current reporting format would be of limited value to me in telling me what I can teach my students explicitly to improve their comprehension or skill in the other domains.”
Professor Munro said this arranges students in order of ability in each domain.
“I can compare my NAPLAN data with like-student cohorts and make inferences about the quality of my teaching,” he said. “It can also draw my attention to the students in the underachieving group and probe further their domain knowledge and skill.”
What NAPLAN potentially provides, says Professor Munro, is a progression or pathway through primary and secondary education.
“For four decades of my teaching, we didn’t have these data. From a lay perspective, I believe it does fulfil a useful function,” he said. “I also believe that for me as a teacher, the reporting aspects could be improved.”