Stop blaming NAPLAN and start doing something to help students excel in writing

Last month a new report was released on the future of NAPLAN. It was commissioned by the eastern state education ministers who appear to be heartily sick of the annual reporting of negative results where commentators and critics embrace a "going backwards" analysis to which the politicians and their bureaucrats seem to have no answer.

The report noted the most problematic results were in writing, yet it found NAPLAN to be "a reliable indicator of some key elements of student writing ability".

Everyone, it appears, likes to blame the writing assessment for the bad news – ministers, academics, principals, teacher organisations, media commentators and so on, but they should not be shooting the messenger.

It is not accurate to say that students go "backwards". As a rule, individual students and cohorts demonstrate progress over time. In too many cases, however, the rate of progress slows down over the years of schooling, particularly after year 5.

National minimum standards in writing represent student performance levels below which these students will have difficulty progressing satisfactorily at school. In 2019 there were 3.8 per cent of year 3 boys and 1.6 per cent of girls below this standard. This is a low proportion but it is noteworthy that there are roughly twice as many boys as girls in this category. By year 9 the percentage has grown significantly to 23.6 per cent of boys and 13.2 per cent of girls. Of serious concern is that almost one-quarter of all boys in year 9 in Australia as well as a significant percentage of girls will have difficulty progressing to the senior years of schooling. It’s not like this is a recent phenomenon. Ten years ago, the numbers were slightly better but still should have been raising alarm bells. Surely ministers and their departments were questioning what was happening in schooling when twice as many boys as girls are below this national minimum and the percentage of boys and girls below it increases up to eight-fold from years 3 to 9.

It is not fair to say that it is the fault of teachers that students are not learning to write. Recently the NSW Educational Standards Authority commissioned a report on how teachers were being taught to teach writing. To begin with, in the education faculties of universities there appears to be a range of not necessarily complementary philosophies on how to teach writing. In some cases there is no advice on teaching specific writing skills at all. So, within and between schools, there can be a lack of consistency in teaching methodologies.

It is not easy to teach writing. Ask any parent supervising their child in the recent bout of home schooling and they will readily attest that helping their child with writing is no mean feat. To teach writing systematically and effectively requires a great deal of knowledge and experience and it would appear that teachers are not receiving this either in pre-service training or through post-service professional development. Our national and state curriculum documents lack any real precision on how writing should be taught. They constantly seem to be under review to change, re-orient and re-direct so that teachers, in all honesty, will have difficulty knowing what needs to be done and there is a view that the changes will make no substantive difference.

So, how does NAPLAN assess writing? It is a "criterion-referenced" assessment – there are 10 criteria covering: whole-text features such as purpose, audience and structure; grammatical features such as sentence structure and cohesion; and, "mechanical" features such as punctuation, paragraphing and spelling. Some criteria such as sentence structure have six scores while others like paragraphing have two. In this type of assessment every mark has meaning. Each score describes a degree of achievement and conversely implies those features not achieved. Teachers can then use class data to target their teaching programs to areas of need.

NAPLAN conducts the most comprehensive assessment of student writing anywhere in the world. Other countries use sample testing whereas the NAPLAN is whole population or census testing. Another important feature of the NAPLAN assessment is that all students from years 3 to 9 are marked on the same scale. That way teachers and parents can map student progress in writing as they move through school. The NAPLAN is teacher-marked and has a diagnostic function in that student achievement is reported in terms of degree of control of key criteria in their writing.

Since 2008, the national and state governments have invested hundreds of millions in producing this significant database of the degree to which whole populations of students have demonstrated competence and control of their writing. It is to the discredit of the education community that so little analysis and research has been undertaken to improve the quality of student writing in that time. Instead our educators want to blame the instrument or, as Donald Trump would argue, we have a problem here because we are testing.

Peter Knapp has written many books on teaching and assessing student writing. Most recently he was a developer of the National Literacy Learning Progression – Writing.