tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/testing-in-schools-10521/articlestesting in schools – The Conversation2015-02-10T06:46:52Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/371802015-02-10T06:46:52Z2015-02-10T06:46:52ZIt’s against human nature to send two-year-olds to school<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71462/original/image-20150209-24664-1ogpid6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Processing children into units of human capital as quickly as possible risks the production of 'damaged goods'.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Genius baby via Bartosz Budrewicz/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In order to make young children “school ready”, the English <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-26031574">government is now encouraging</a> parents to place their children in school nurseries <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-24818439">shortly after their second birthday</a>. But there is evidence to suggest that this policy might be poorly aligned to the developmental needs of such young children and that it contravenes their underlying human nature.</p>
<p>In the broader history of humanity, state-funded schooling is a very recent public strategy and is only about two centuries old in England. It arose from the industrial revolution as a process to instill the population with basic literacy and numeracy skills. Until even more recently, there was never any suggestion that a school environment was the right place in which to nurture children under five years of age. </p>
<p>So let’s take a step back and consider whether our human hunter-gatherer heritage has really attuned infants towards such an environment during this very early stage of their development. Human beings are, at base, linguistic primates, born with <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-nature-nurture-and-neuroplasticity-10734">brains that are highly “plastic”</a>, which subsequently undergo a huge amount of development in interaction with the environment and, most importantly, other people. </p>
<h2>Start up the jazz</h2>
<p>The core human skills are rooted in communication. This requires a child to learn how to independently translate highly abstract thoughts into a complex combination of symbols which coalesce in spoken language. The <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/icd.457/abstract">psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk</a> proposes that what happens between infants and carers in one-to-one interactions is a type of improvised symbolic “dance”, which she refers to as a “jazz duet”. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71461/original/image-20150209-24704-1lj08x8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/71461/original/image-20150209-24704-1lj08x8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71461/original/image-20150209-24704-1lj08x8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71461/original/image-20150209-24704-1lj08x8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71461/original/image-20150209-24704-1lj08x8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71461/original/image-20150209-24704-1lj08x8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/71461/original/image-20150209-24704-1lj08x8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Learning to play life’s rhythms.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/thundershead/3524477568/sizes/l">Thundershead</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To be truly what psychologists call “intersubjective” – able to communicate our meanings to other people and to grasp their meanings in return – such interactions must be completely spontaneous. Each party – the child and the carer – must freely respond to the communications of the other. To give an analogy, as every jazz musician knows, in order to “jam”, you have to learn how to tune into the rhythms of others. </p>
<p>The way in which human beings naturally “boot” this system in early childhood is through spontaneous, play-based interaction with both peers and adults. From simple beginnings, the infant then becomes increasingly adept at effectively responding to the communications of others. The process of environmentally “booting” such an evolved system is not peculiar to human beings – it is also observed in other animals. For example, <a href="http://www.toomuchtoosoon.org/uploads/2/0/3/8/20381265/school_starting_age_-_final.pdf">researchers have found</a> that in young rats, free play activity builds neuronal connections in the amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, which deal with emotion regulation and social skills. </p>
<h2>Results factories</h2>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ux9Hg5sHaiY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>If modern zoos rightly go to great lengths to create environments that are as natural as possible for the animals they house, why do we care so little about extending this care and consideration to our own species? Politicians in England would appear to be focused on a futile mission to eradicate millions of years of evolution in order to subjugate human nature to the demands of international capitalist markets. </p>
<p>At the genesis of this process, which resulted in the imposition of a national curriculum for schools steeped in concepts of “employability”, <a href="http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475">Margaret Thatcher bluntly stated</a> that: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” The steady march of this philosophy is now poised at the threshold of the nursery, with the coalition’s recent requirement for a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/progress-check-at-age-2-and-eyfs-profile">progress report on two-year-olds</a>, and New Labour’s previous imposition of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-must-scrap-new-baseline-tests-for-primary-school-children-36558">formal assessment</a> for five-year-olds.</p>
<p>For the past 35 years, successive governments have doggedly pursued the mission of “education as production of economic capital” through a state education system that has been increasingly monitored and directed by the government watchdog Ofsted, with its focus on data generated from standard assessments such as GCSEs. While each successive government argues that it has raised achievement, this is a spurious premise. </p>
<p>What they have in fact done is drive teachers into programming children towards specific test responses, in order to artificially raise achievement data. The current government now wishes to extend this process into the <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-must-scrap-new-baseline-tests-for-primary-school-children-36558">very earliest stages of childhood</a>.</p>
<p>At the same time, other nations have made far greater recent gains in literacy performance in the mid-teenage years. The 2009 results for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s programme for international student assessments found that Shanghai China, Korea and Finland were the <a href="http://www.oecd.org/pisa/46660259.pdf">best performing nations</a> in terms of literacy. There are vast cultural differences between these nations, but they do have one feature in common – a <a href="http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.PRM.AGES">school entry age</a> of seven. The nations directly below them, but above the UK, have a school entry age of six.</p>
<h2>Kids in a cage?</h2>
<p>Internationally renowned psychologist <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/03/why_preschool_shouldnt_be_like_school.html">Alison Gopnik’s research</a> shows that direct teaching at an early stage in a child’s development:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Leads children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Schooling infants is therefore commensurate with placing a young animal in a cage. Human beings <a href="http://evolution.about.com/od/Evolution-Glossary/a/What-Is-A-Niche.htm">evolved in a niche</a> in which the requirement to learn how to engage in complex spontaneous interaction is paramount. Taking short cuts in early childhood in pursuit of processing human beings into units of human capital as quickly as possible risks the production of “damaged goods”. </p>
<p>The question for the English government should not be how to find funds to build more schools and put more teachers into more classrooms to deal with an increasing number of ever-younger pupils. Instead, it should be about supporting families and local communities to care for and educate young children within environments that are most appropriate to their biologically evolved needs. </p>
<hr>
<p>Next read: <a href="https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-at-what-age-are-children-ready-for-school-29005">At what age are children ready for school?</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/37180/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pam Jarvis is a member of the academic advisory team for the National "Save Childhood" and "Too Much, Too Soon" campaign.</span></em></p>In order to make young children “school ready”, the English government is now encouraging parents to place their children in school nurseries shortly after their second birthday. But there is evidence…Pam Jarvis, Senior Lecturer, Department of Children, Young People and Families, Leeds Trinity UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/346342014-12-01T12:51:33Z2014-12-01T12:51:33ZChildren born in summer suffer at school – but here’s how to start tackling this problem<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65944/original/image-20141201-20598-1qqbfbu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">I wish ... I was born a few months later. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/s/child+birthday/search.html?page=1&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=54584947">Boy with birthday cake via Ilya Andriyanov/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Is your birthday in June or December? An irrelevant question for most adults, but for children whether they were born in the summer or the winter can have a real impact on how well they perform at school. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/376216/SFR46_2014_text.pdf">New statistics released</a> by the Department for Education show that the gap is most pronounced in the early years. Results for the Early Years Foundation Profile – an assessment done in the year children turn five years old – showed that in England, 49% of those born in the summer months achieve a “good level of development”, compared to 71% of children born in the autumn months.</p>
<p>This summer birth problem is an international one, occurring because schools and other educational institutions tend to recruit new pupils in terms of an inflexible calendar year. In England, a child born on August, 31 would go to school a whole year ahead of a child born on September, 1 – even though the two children might have been born only minutes apart. </p>
<p>Every subsequent year the summer-born child will be up to one year younger than other children in their class. Their attainment, self-esteem, and chances of being selected <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-an-autumn-birthday-could-win-you-first-place-on-sports-day-28428">for sports teams</a> or even university <a href="http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/impact-month-birth-child-development">are considerably lower</a>, all other things being equal.</p>
<h2>Changes with age</h2>
<p>It is hard to fully assess how the problem changes with age, because the expected results vary as the child progresses through school – and after the age of 16 are based heavily on who stays on in education. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, the gaps remain substantial throughout primary school and early secondary school. The <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/182664/DFE-RR017.pdf">most recent figures</a> tracking the gap show differences of around 8% in the proportion of autumn and summer-born pupils reaching the “expected” levels of writing, reading and maths in Key Stage 1 (ages five to seven). Around the same percentage point difference appears in the number of pupils attaining the expected levels of English and maths at Key Stage 2 (ages seven to 11).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65940/original/image-20141201-20598-13l0a6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65940/original/image-20141201-20598-13l0a6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65940/original/image-20141201-20598-13l0a6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=208&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65940/original/image-20141201-20598-13l0a6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=208&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65940/original/image-20141201-20598-13l0a6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=208&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65940/original/image-20141201-20598-13l0a6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65940/original/image-20141201-20598-13l0a6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65940/original/image-20141201-20598-13l0a6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=261&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Moving up further, around 6% more children born in the autumn gain five or more “good” GCSEs including English and maths than children born in the summer. This represents the possibility of quite different futures for thousands of young people every year – a problem caused by an artificial date threshold of our own creation. </p>
<h2>How to reduce the gap</h2>
<p>Research suggests that <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03054980600776589?journalCode=core20#.VHxPbcnvbIo">most of the progress</a> made by children over one primary school year can be explained simply by their increased age. This is true whether they actually attend school that year (born in August) or not (born in September). The summer birth problem also appears in different societies, and is common to sub-groups such as children of different ethnic origins. It seems to be almost entirely a school calendar problem.</p>
<p>It cannot be solved by altering the date on which pupils enter schools. An autumn or winter-born problem would be no better than a summer-born one. Researchers have found that it cannot be solved by <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220671.2013.867474#.VHxD8snvbIo">delaying entry to kindergarten</a>, or <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03055698.2014.936828?journalCode=ceds20#.VHxEEsnvbIo">making pupils repeat a year</a>. The problem is <a href="http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/17950/">worsened by selection, setting and streaming</a> of pupils; yet despite this, such ideas are gaining traction again in <a href="https://theconversation.com/forcing-schools-to-set-by-ability-is-not-backed-up-by-evidence-31315">policy debates around education</a> in England. </p>
<p>There are a range of possible solutions, such as putting tests and assessments online and making pupils sit them only once they reach a certain age, rather than always at the end of a school year. But probably the simplest solution in the short term is to routinely <a href="http://www.nfer.ac.uk/research/centre-for-assessment/age-standardisation.cfm">age-standardise</a> all assessment results. </p>
<p>This would mean that children could all still sit tests or exams at the same time and the results could still come out annually. But, as with many existing commercial tests of literacy, numeracy or cognitive attainment, the results would be adjusted for the precise age of each candidate. These age-independent results would be the official record, and could then be used instead of the raw scores for any future educational decisions – whether by schools, universities, employers, individuals or families.</p>
<p>There is no valid reason why the younger children in each year group should have a worse chance in education because of a bureaucratically convenient decision outside their control. We <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/education-committee/dfe-evidence-check-forum/summer-born-children/?id=94536">can</a> and should do something about it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34634/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Gorard receives funding from the ESRC, Nuffield Foundation, EU and EEF.</span></em></p>Is your birthday in June or December? An irrelevant question for most adults, but for children whether they were born in the summer or the winter can have a real impact on how well they perform at school…Stephen Gorard, Professor of Education and Public Policy, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/334372014-10-27T15:17:12Z2014-10-27T15:17:12ZHow tests and wrong answers help us remember what we learn<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62878/original/y7mwmpy5-1414417131.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What will you remember?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&search_tracking_id=OB6lcvbcgITzb6l63u0Cmw&searchterm=test&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=162855896">Test via Syda Productions/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Teachers give tests to find out what their students know. But tests do a lot more than that and can have a <a href="http://people.duke.edu/%7Eab259/pubs/Roediger&Butler%282010%29.pdf">powerful effect on what</a> a student remembers. In a typical research study looking at the links between tests and memory, one group of participants might be told “Batman’s butler’s name is Alfred”. Another group would be asked “What is the name of Batman’s butler?” and then told it’s Alfred. If you ask again weeks later, the group that was tested remembers that the answer is Alfred better than the group that was just told the information.</p>
<p>But what happens if you get the answer wrong? For example, what if you say Jeffrey (a common error, in <a href="http://sites.williams.edu/nk2/files/2011/08/Kornell.Metcalfe.2006b.pdf">my research</a> back when The Fresh Prince of Bel Air was on TV), and I say no, it’s Alfred. Would you have been better off not being tested? </p>
<p>Common sense says if you practice making errors you learn to make errors. From this has grown a long tradition in psychology aimed at <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1404283/pdf/jeabehav00187-0085.pdf">promoting “errorless learning”.</a> On the other hand, common sense also says we learn most from making mistakes. So which is it?</p>
<h2>Does age matter?</h2>
<p>Existing research in this area has shown that it depends on age. If you’re young and healthy, <a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1399515/1/RPottsLastRevision.pdf">mistakes enhance learning</a>. But people with memory impairments, including the mild impairment that comes with normal ageing, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09602011.2011.639619">benefit most from errorless learning</a>. In short: nimble mind, errors are fine; for granddad, errors are bad.</p>
<p>New <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-10/bcfg-ibf102214.php">research</a> challenges all that. Psychologists Andrée-Ann Cyr and Nicole D. Anderson noticed that in <a href="http://sites.williams.edu/nk2/files/2011/08/Kornell.Hays_.Bjork_.2009.pdf">prior studies with younger adults</a>, the tests typically involved asking people about concepts, such as to name a kind of fruit. But in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09602011.2011.639626#.VE5KlJPF8e0">studies with older adults</a> the tests typically involved filling in lexical cues, such as “st-____”. </p>
<p>Even though both groups are then told the answer is strawberry, the learning is different, with those <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-014-0408-z">younger people who made errors</a> when asked to name a word based on a concept, remembering the answer weeks later. But it was unclear what mattered most: being young or old or if the cues in the test were conceptual or lexical. </p>
<h2>Getting it wrong helps</h2>
<p>In their study with groups of both old and young people, Cyr and Anderson have now found that the types of clue makes all the difference. In their conceptual test, both groups remembered more from a test that they didn’t get right – such as being asked to name a pastry, followed by feedback that “it was a tart” – than they did if they had just been told the answer straight away without being tested on it. </p>
<p>In their lexical test, both groups learned more from errorless learning. They remembered more words in a later test if they were simply shown “st and strawberry”, than if they’d been shown “st____” completely out of context, made a wrong guess about the word, and were then shown the answer “strawberry”. The same pattern held for both age groups. </p>
<p>Most of what we learn is conceptual, in the sense that it involves relating new learning to information we’ve learned before. For example, if you were to take a quiz about this article, it wouldn’t have questions on it like “er____?”, it would have questions like “when does errorless learning help and when does it hurt?” </p>
<p>So the practical lesson of this new study is that making errors (and then getting feedback) is a good way to learn and retain conceptual information. If you want to learn non-conceptual information, such as linking words to meaningless non-words, making errors will not help. In rhyme, it goes like this: to really understand, errors are grand; for meaningless stuff, being right is enough.</p>
<h2>The test’s the thing</h2>
<p>Yet these studies are, understandably, not completely realistic. The participants were basically just guessing at the answers. Also, in real-life tests it’s common to write down a wrong answer and not find out the correct answer for a while, for example when you take a test and then it is returned a week later.</p>
<p><a href="http://sites.williams.edu/nk2/files/2011/08/Kornell.2014.pdf">Another recent study</a> might allay these concerns. Participants were asked questions such as: “What is the world’s tallest grass” that they could really think about, instead of blindly guessing. After making errors on an initial test, they had to wait 24 hours to find out the correct answer. Even so, trying to answer the question on the first day and getting it wrong led them to remember more in a later memory test than not being tested on the information at all.</p>
<h2>Kids need to be challenged</h2>
<p>We all want kids to do well in school. But these results raise a difficult question: what does it mean to do well? We often assume it means doing well in the classroom, when answering questions or taking tests. But if the ultimate goal is to do well after graduation, then doing too well in school might be a problem. Perhaps we should actually be concerned when kids aren’t making errors in school because they could be learning more if they faced bigger challenges.</p>
<p>There is no evidence that it’s good to make errors on purpose. But teachers do need to make sure that the set of problems a child faces is challenging enough so that he or she is engaged in productive struggle. If you’re not making mistakes, you might not be learning.</p>
<hr>
<p>Next read: <a href="https://theconversation.com/failure-can-be-productive-for-teaching-children-maths-22418">Failure can be productive for teaching children maths </a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33437/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nate Kornell receives funding from the James S. McDonnell Foundation.</span></em></p>Teachers give tests to find out what their students know. But tests do a lot more than that and can have a powerful effect on what a student remembers. In a typical research study looking at the links…Nate Kornell, Assistant professor of cognitive psychology, Williams CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/269232014-05-20T01:19:27Z2014-05-20T01:19:27ZNAPLAN testing does more harm than good<p>New research raises questions about the impacts of the National Assessment Program – Literacy And Numeracy <a href="http://www.nap.edu.au/naplan/naplan.html">(NAPLAN)</a> on the wellbeing of students and on positive teaching and learning approaches. NAPLAN was introduced to improve literacy and numeracy in Australian primary and secondary schools, but the question has to be asked: is it worth it?</p>
<p>The suite of tests that make up NAPLAN, administered in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, are intended to measure three things: first, how individual students are performing; second, the extent to which national literacy and numeracy benchmarks are being achieved at each school; and third, how well educational programs are working in Australian schools.</p>
<p>Seven years of NAPLAN testing have produced mixed results.</p>
<p>Our team spent time in five school communities (in Victoria and New South Wales) where we interviewed students, parents, teachers and school principals. The <a href="http://www.whitlam.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/694199/The_experience_of_education_-_Qualitative_Study.pdf">report</a> is possibly the most significant to date as it is the first to study the impact on students.</p>
<h2>What did the research find?</h2>
<p>The findings reveal that, against its stated goals, NAPLAN is at best a blunt tool.</p>
<p>The results aren’t universally negative. Some teachers find the results informative, there is evidence that in some schools NAPLAN results have been a trigger to implement literacy and numeracy programs, and some parents appreciate the straightforward assessment of their children’s achievement levels.</p>
<p>However, the research shows that NAPLAN is plagued by negative impacts on student wellbeing and learning. Our previous survey of teachers found that 90% of teachers reported that students felt stressed before taking the test.</p>
<p>This study of student experiences of NAPLAN draws attention to the need to take student wellbeing into account in educational initiatives. While Australian educational policies do not explicitly state all measures must be in the best interests of the children, they should conform to the ethical practice of “doing no harm”.</p>
<p>The many unintended consequences of NAPLAN stem from the failure to take the interests of all students seriously. The formal and inflexible style of NAPLAN is not conducive to learning and teaching approaches that emphasise deep learning.</p>
<p>NAPLAN, which uses language and a style of testing that is often foreign to students, strays from the systems built in classrooms that promote learning.</p>
<p>Our report found that a majority of students disliked NAPLAN and were unsure of its purpose. A majority reported feelings of stress.</p>
<p>Those who were struggling in maths and/or literacy were the most anxious about whether they would fail. Worryingly, schools reported that these students (whom the tests are designed to help) were often the ones least likely to sit the tests. A smaller proportion reported specific stress-related conditions such as insomnia, hyperventilation, profuse sweating, nail biting, headaches, stomach aches and migraines.</p>
<h2>Majority want NAPLAN scrapped</h2>
<p>When asked what message they would like to give to the Australian government about NAPLAN, a majority of respondents suggested that it should be scrapped.</p>
<p>However, many also made suggestions about how NAPLAN could be made more relevant (through the use of better examples and more accessible language) and how to lower levels of stress. Those in favour of NAPLAN focused on the opportunity it provides students to practise the art of sitting tests.</p>
<p>The detailed analysis of students’ experiences in five diverse Australian communities contained in our report provides the first systematic analysis of the impact of NAPLAN testing on students. It reinforces the views of many parents, school principals and teachers: that NAPLAN has significant unintended consequences, which have a negative impact on the quality of learning and student wellbeing.</p>
<p>Although NAPLAN testing is designed to improve the quality of education young people receive in Australia, its implementation, uses and misuses mean that it undermines quality education and does harm that is not in the best interests of Australian children.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/26923/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Johanna Wyn receives funding from the Whitlam Institute. </span></em></p>New research raises questions about the impacts of the National Assessment Program – Literacy And Numeracy (NAPLAN) on the wellbeing of students and on positive teaching and learning approaches. NAPLAN…Johanna Wyn, Director, Youth Research CentreAcademic, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.