The idea that NAPLAN is not high stakes struck me as it has others. Perception is reality - and the very real perception is that NAPLAN is high stakes. Parents have enormous investment in the results of their 8 year-olds.

The Whitlam Institute's research is not unique. There is (near) universal acknowledgment among scholars that high-stakes tests are placing children under (unnecessary) stress.

Barry fairly states that a test like NAPLAN allows a broader consideration of a student's performance at school - but only if you consider that a measure of academic success can be captured by NAPLAN. There is ongoing debate among education researchers as to how effectively colouring little bubbles on standardised tests measures academic success.

More broadly, when what gets measured is such a narrow (albeit important) range of academic skills, then other educational opportunities are bound to be ignored. While Barry accurately states that teaching to the test, practicing the test, etc, is a waste of time, there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence that these things are precisely what is happening in Australian schools. I have had MULTIPLE emails, phone calls, and conversations from concerned parents describing their children's schools reducing time on music, sports, art, and even science (oh, and I should also mention lunch) in order to prep and practice for NAPLAN.

A couple of other points - NAPLAN claims to measure numeracy and literacy. The Whitlam Institute's research argues it does not do so effectively. NAPLAN testing occurs in May. Results are published in November. Significant development may occur in the life, body, and brain, of 8, 10, and 12 year olds, not to mention 14 year olds. The results are essentially meaningless and the head of ACARA is on the record from a Senate inquiry into NAPLAN as acknowledging it.

Lastly, while academic skill in unarguably important, employer surveys indicate that the skills NAPLAN assesses are not as high a priority for the workplace as are skills such as collaboration, creativity, and communication. NAPLAN does not assess any of these and may actually stymie their development. And NAPLAN and the myschool website may provide a metric, however unreliable, regarding a school's academic performance but it gives no useful information about the culture of the school and the quality and style of teaching occurring there.

Final concern - Should the current govt get their way, NAPLAN may be linked with teacher and school incentives (of the financial kind). Should this occur, the (claytons) high stakes test is going to get a whole lot more high stakes.

'Teaching to the test' is not new. It existed long before NAPLAN, and it is not just a problem in primary and secondary education. The pressures to 'teach to the exam' have existed in Universities since the mid 1990s.

Those pressures have increased in the last decade. KPIs, the increasing dependence by University VCs and faculty Deans on 'one-size-fits-all' directives from a phalanx of Learning and Teaching professionals, the abandonment of a collegial approach to teaching, the imposition of top-down business and management practices, and the increasing competition between Universities to source revenue from fee-paying international and domestic students, may all partly explain the increase in these pressures, but what is also clear to me is that to a considerable extent those pressures come in the first instance from the students themselves. I would not be the first University lecturer to despair that the most common question first-year students ask is "What do I need to know to pass the exam?" That is often the only question that many first-year students ever ask.

Learning and study habits, both good and bad, are developed and reinforced to a considerable extent before students reach University. Once ingrained at the primary and secondary levels, bad learning and study habits are not easily corrected. Many of our primary and secondary students, and regretably our University students as well, learn how to pass exams, but do they learn how to learn? I doubt it.

The risk with NAPLAN is that it may entrench a primary and secondary education sector that teaches students how to pass exams but fails to teach them how to learn.

Student achievement is very simple. There is a triumvirate:
1) Parent involvement
2) Teacher ability
3) Cohort interest

NAPLAN does look at a student's ability in Maths and English compared to others at a similar age, at a particular point in time, regardless of any other issues present in that student's life at that point in time. The test itself is not bad, the manner in which the results are used is bad. It only examines one point of the triumvirate, that of teacher ability. If the teacher is in a school where parent involvement and cohort interest are high, the teacher might look great, but remove one of the points of the triumvirate, the teacher might not look so great.

One other point. How useful is a diagnostic test when we don't get results until 5 months later? Basically half the school year.

As a parent, I value an independent assessment that gives me an idea of how my children are performing. My own kids results are important to me and not the overall schools results. Most parents get a fairly good idea of the quality of their school from talking to their own children, the teachers, and other parents.
The fear of league tables seems to be exaggerated. The unnecessary demonizing of NAPLAN seems to be creating the reasons used to oppose it.

"Their primary purpose is to give parents information on how well their children are developing fundamental skills in literacy and numeracy from a broader perspective than individual teachers and schools have."

This comment surprises me. I was under the impression that the purpose of NAPLAN was to compare macro level performance (i.e. across states, school systems, particular groups of students). Rather than give feedback to individual students, NAPLAN can give broader-level feedback to highlight particular trends (e.g. if a school isn't teaching certain concepts well).

Surely if, as the article states, the primary purpose of NAPLAN is to give parents more feedback on their children, there are more cost-effective and sensitive ways of doing this? For example, mandating bi-annual parent-teacher interviews or specifying the type of feedback and data to be provided in school reports.

I’m surprised that Barry equates NAPLAN with the NSW Basic Skills tests. The latter were introduced under legislated agreement that the results not be used to compare schools – because the consequences of doing so were well known at the time.

The tests didn’t distort the curriculum and provided excellent information to teachers and parents. NAPLAN on the other hand has been hijacked to serve other agendas - and the consequences are now with us.

What I would really like to see is research based on the experience of the children themselves. My daughter is the one coming home and telling me that they are being taught specifically to the test. For example they were drilled to write a specific way for a certain exam in year 3 and then never did that specific type of writing again. Same thing happened in year 5. She says they of course promptly forget how to write that way because the drilling only occurs for 3 months. What is the point of it?
Everyone hates the pressure. And everyone loses. I had a friend who was a teacher and who normally taught children who needed extra help. Last year she was taken off that task for the first few months of the year to help drill the year 3 kids in her school for NAPLAN. The children who needed extra help didn't get it until NAPLAN was over.
These are not isolated stories. Everyone has the same stories.

NAPLAN strikes me an an empire building exercise of major proportions.

If the planners could guarantee a level playing field for
the school - area, buildings, comfort, furniture
management style of the school
the finances of the school
the physical surroundings
the atmosphere of the school and classrooms
the parenting method of the family
the socio-economic position of the family
the emotional state of the family
the breakfast/ lunch taken that morning
first language of the family
the physical health of the family members
ETC., ETC., ETC.

Then I would be interested in the results and how they could be used.

Of course teachers hate any way of measuring their teaching standards, who knows what THAT might lead to and students have always hated tests its just now they know if they complain of stress then lots of people will become overly concerned, like their parents always have. Howevger this is good training for the real world, you know, applying for stress leave and such forth.

More attention needs to paid to what is actually in the NAPLAN tests, how this influences how and what students learn in school, and whether these are useful skills and capabilities for 21st century learners. Should we for example be teaching students how to write expositions, when we know, as this website shows, many different sides to any argument or discussion? Should we be teaching kids that the subtle inferences in an advertising texts can be understood within four multiple choice answers? What's more, does the delay of several months to parents, teachers and students themselves receiving the results actually benefit students learning? Discuss the merits of NAPLAN by all means, but discuss it in real education terms. The fact is, schools are 'teaching to the tests,' the results are delayed by months, and much of the content of these tests is untested as to how it relates to 21st learners.

“While the data have been irresponsibly used by some parts of the media to publish raw league tables that take no account of a school’s context” What a load of rubbish. Doing something with data that you or the government does not like is not irresponsible.

The testing was funded by tax payers and it was their children who have been tested. In my view this is unquestionably data that is owned by citizens. The raw data should be available under the principles of ‘open data’ and ‘open government’. The public has the right to analyse the data and make their own interpretations. It is sad that the My Schools web site has been engineered to deliberately hamper this.

If NAPLAN is not a good measurement of competency, then use ICAS test.
As any discipline, we need a measurement or a benchmark. If NAPLAN is too easier or incomplete "way" of measuring the teaching or learning, then, improve the test.

We, need a standardized test, otherwise, we do not know where we stand. We can not assume the "way of our learning" or the "way of our teaching" is the best. Simply, we cannot put our head in the sand. We are 25th out of 27 developed nation in terms of school education. We may slip away from the developed nations to be amongst developing countries very soon.

Like it or not, competition is imposed to all nations. We have no way to avoid. We can laugh at Chinese, for an example, that students are lacking of creativity (I think inaccurate by the way). Look at IT PCT patent numbers, there is lack of evidence that China only create "study machines".

So, if we find NAPLAN is incomplete set of tests, improve it.

We demand more test, put more pressures on teachers/students.

Our resource based economy only can benefit o.xx% of our population. Most of us needs to work in other fields. To improve the our outlooks in ever competitive world (like it or not), our kids need to improve in their learning skills, our schools need to be held responsible for the teaching. We need to help them to learn to be entrepreneurs.

So, more tests, more accountabilities in teaching and schools.