NAPLAN disruptions have continued across the country for a second day with “knock-on impacts” including a potential fault with the reading assessment, prompting serious questions about the integrity of the tests. Source: Daily Telegraph.
School principals were given the go-ahead to give students extra time to finish yesterday’s writing test on a case-by-case basis – a move at odds with the usual strict time period given for each assessment and creating a further divide between students who are or are not given additional time.
And there have also been reports of varied automatic time allocations for the online reading test.
Stephen Gniel, the CEO of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), which runs the annual tests, said there had been some ongoing impacts on Thursday following Wednesday’s two-hour platform shutdown, which affected up to 1.4 million students.
“We understand there are knock-on impacts following the disruption and we are working through these with test administration authorities to support schools and students,” Mr Gniel said.
“Schools are also able to give students extra time to complete their tests due to the disruption.”
Shadow Education Minister Julian Leeser said there was a “cloud over the integrity of the data”.
“Since yesterday I have heard stories from parents, teachers and children around the country about how different their experiences were,” he said.
“Some students did the whole test twice with the same prompt. Some did it once. Others started the test, stopped, and continued after a break. Still others had their tests rescheduled and will now do it with different prompts.”
With concerns also raised by parents about an unfair advantage to students who saw yesterday’s writing prompt and had more time to prepare their responses due to the delay in testing, Mr Gniel said that would be taken into consideration.
“Once the tests have been completed and the data from the assessments reviewed, ACARA will work with states and territories to consider any additional measures needed to ensure fair reporting of the results,” he said.
But Australian Catholic University standardised assessment expert Steven Lewis said the integrity of this year’s writing tests was highly questionable.
“The whole notion of a standardised test is that you’ve got a set of standardised conditions under which the test is administered,” Associate Professor Lewis said. “As soon as you change the conditions, you really do shift what can be inferred from the test results.”
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare yesterday said: “The bottom line here is that this is not good enough.”
FULL STORY
Integrity of NAPLAN tests called into question as ‘knock-on’ impacts continue to mar assessments (By Mary Papadakis, Daily Telegraph)
