Understanding Your Child’s NAPLAN Results: A Teacher-Parent’s Perspective

The NAPLAN results from this year’s testing are in, and the team at Seeds of Knowledge are hearing how our students have fared.

More to the point, this is my first year as a parent of a NAPLAN kid. I’m looking at this familiar test through new eyes, and it’s opened them to a swathe of anxieties around the results.

NAPLAN is one thing as a teacher, but it’s a whole new ball game as a parent!

I’m lucky in that my classroom experience gives me an insight into how NAPLAN works, what it means, and how the results can be used to support our most vulnerable learners. Here’s what I’ve learned.

NAPLAN Basics

NAPLAN stands for National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy.

The test is an assessment that’s given to students in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9. It’s not a curriculum test, but instead checks progress in key ares of reading, writing and numeracy.

All schools in the country participate, and run the test on the same days.

The majority of the testing is done online, with only the youngest cohort using more traditional pencil-and-paper to test writing skills.

While this is primarily to allow efficient collection of information, it allows for a different kind of snapshot for many younger students who struggle with their handwriting.

NAPLAN is also structured to adapt readily  to children with disabilities, with a range of support measures in place that allow children to participate with the tools they need to complete the test.

What Does NAPLAN Tests Show?

NAPLAN was designed to show educational progress at a population level. To put it simply, it describes how well students are learning as a group. The test results can be interpreted to show how schools are performing from suburb to suburb, across the state,and across the country.

This is a valuable tool for the people who run our schools. It helps them spot schools that need extra support, in terms of funding, staffing and other requirements.

It also helps individual schools identify areas that need more improvement. For example, a school with lower than average results in maths may respond by investing in teacher training, or a school with poor reading may refresh its stock of junior school readers.

For parents, it represents a snapshot in time of a child’s skills and understandings. It places them in relation to their peers across the country, and gives you an idea of how they perform in the most critical skills.

How to Read a NAPLAN Test

• The NAPLAN report sent home to parents is a set of simple bar graphs spread over two pages. The student is rated using proficiency standards, aligned with curriculum expectations for each year level.
• The information gathered during testing is compiled, and each student is given a score across four key areas – Reading, Writing, Language Conventions (spelling, grammar, punctuation), and Numeracy.
• There is also a green bar with a shaded area that indicates results of the middle 60% of the nation’s students. A single circle indicates the child’s level of proficiency, as well as how they compare to other students in their cohort.
• There are four ranks.The top two are Exceeding and Strong. This indicates a child whose results demonstrate a high degree of skill in that area. The bottom two ranks are Developing and Needs support. Children who are placed in these two ranks are likely to need extra support to reach curriculum benchmarks.

Putting NAPLAN in its Place

NAPLAN is a big fixture in school calendars, and the results can seem foreboding. But it’s important to keep the test in its place. It’s just a single moment in time  – a snapshot, more or less. It’s not the whole picture.

It’s critical to remember that NAPLAN was designed to help school administrators make population level decisions around curriculum, funding and staffing.

It doesn’t offer enough detail to give parents much information on its own, no matter what the results.

NAPLAN results need to be taken into account alongside other information, like report cards, teacher assessments and your own intuition.

Making NAPLAN Results Work for Your Child

That said, NAPLAN can be useful – but only if you compare the results with other ways of assessing your child. I call this ‘triangulation’. Discrepancies between the two sets of results can highlight areas where extra support is needed.

For example, a very high NAPLAN results in Maths for a child who is described as struggling in the classroom on their report card tells us that there’s a barrier in place that prevents the student from fulling engaging. Low Language Conventions for a child who otherwise performs well in the classroom suggests that an unfamiliar test may have presented too much of a challenge to under-developed critical thinking skills.

Your own assessments of your child’s confidence towards their schooling also makes a difference.

Our Maths student from above may have told a parent that maths at school is boring – their strong NAPLAN results indicate that they may be a high achiever who is simply not being challenged in the classroom. They’lll thrive with more advanced, engaging material.

Alternately, a child who is anxious at home when confronted with new challenges, or who finds unfamiliar environments stressful is often a student who will also find the novelty of NAPLAN off-putting. They’re an excellent candidate for a broader, all-round support that boosts confidence and their higher-order thinking skills.

The trick to getting the most from your NAPLAN is to compare it to what you already know, both from your own understanding of your child and from reports cards and parent/teacher interviews. Between the three, you can get quite an insightful snapshot!

Getting the Pieces Together

In truth, your child is unique, and even a carefully triangulated set of results is not going to give a complete picture.

They can give you flashes of insight, and a good teacher will provide grounding through their assessment across the school year.

Other community members, like Occupational Therapists, Pediatricians, and tutors – including those at Seeds of Knowledge – can also provide additional feedback and support.

It’s always good to reach out to other members of your child’s community if you’re worried.