Assessment and NAPLAN

Element 3.1.5

Demonstrate knowledge and use of a range of strategies to assess student achievement of learning outcomes.

Assessment should take a cyclic form, ‘assess – plan – teach’ and so on. Unfortunately, many teachers leave assessment till the end of a program or unit of work. But just how does this benefit the students? Sure, it informs the teacher of what that student is capable of and where they are at, but then what? A lot of teachers just move on to another topic at that point. This however renders assessment useless. For what is the point of assessment if it is not used to inform further teaching?

Assessment should be used throughout a teaching program. In my teaching experience I have aimed to use a variety of assessment techniques, recognising that different situations allow children different ways to demonstrate their thinking (e.g. engaging children in dialogue, written work samples).

If there is one thing that has been emphasised throughout my four years of study it is that each child is different and in a class children should not be viewed as a group. Just because students are in the same year level does not mean that they are all at that level ability wise. Just as tasks should be created to cater to the different abilities and needs of the children so should assessment be provided which caters to the various learning needs in the classroom.

Providing varied assessment strategies reflects the understanding that each child has different ways of best demonstrating and representing their learning, provides more opportunities for children to reveal thought processes and understand, and hence demonstrates equity in the classroom. I feel that informal strategies of assessment perhaps allow more insight into the child’s ability to understand a concept. For instance, I believe that teacher observations of how students interact with resources and student discussion are more valuable than the results drawn from a NAPLAN test. Assessment results in an environment which children are more accustomed to brings forth much more valid results than a NAPLAN test would, or at least this is what I have observed so far in my practice.

In many ways, I feel that standardized testing such as NAPLAN puts children who do not perform well under pressure at a disadvantage. I’ve found in my own experience as a student, even throughout university and highschool that I perform better at some assessment tasks simply because I prefer certain types of assessment over others.

Considering all we know today about how different students express their ways of knowing based on their capabilities, I feel the NAPLAN is rather backwards. NAPLAN only utilises one method of assessing students, i.e. using timed paper and pencil tests. All teachers should know that there are a range of assessment strategies at our disposal, but the NAPLAN utlises only one. Perhaps it is out of convenience that NAPLAN uses this form of assessment, but I don’t think that it is an overly fair system of assessment for both the students and the teachers.

What it comes down to with assessment is does the assessment allow students to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of certain concepts to the best of their ability? In my opinion, it does not.