Hope collection

Unlearning the test: How can we expose NAPLAN’s hidden pathways and reclaim broader educational goals?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Reclaim curriculum priorities:
  Prioritise diverse learning experiences and reclaim a broad curriculum, ensuring arts, sciences, and humanities maintain equitable attention to foster holistic student development.

• Transparent staffing decisions:
  Clearly communicate staffing and resource allocation processes, ensuring decisions are inclusive and not dictated by testing performance across year levels. Allocate teachers and support staff based on pedagogical strengths and student needs.

• Critical reflection:
  Regularly review the implicit and explicit influences of NAPLAN on teaching and curriculum planning to identify hidden impacts, question test-centric norms and maintain educational integrity.

• Teacher support mechanisms:
  Implement structured support pathways addressing test-related stress and mitigating NAPLAN-related tensions. Implement professional pedagogical development that reduce NAPLAN-related practices and foster teacher judgement.

• Promote rich data practices:
  Develop and adopt diverse, balanced measures of educational success that extend beyond standardised tests. Ensure that accountability systems capture comprehensive learning outcomes to enable rich, student-centred pedagogies and empower teachers to adopt humanising approaches to data.

Abstract

This paper engages, Sara Ahmed’s theorising on ‘the uses of use’ to frame an analysis of the hidden, embedded effects of standardised testing policy that have become normative practice/s in Queensland, Australia. It (re)examines data from an ethno-case study into the datafication of assessment and learning over one school year, in primary and secondary schooling contexts, to understand the uses of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in a new, critical light. We explore schools’ contemporary uses of NAPLAN – intended or otherwise – to demonstrate how the policy effects of NAPLAN have become insidiously submerged within the daily practices in schools. Drawing on interviews with 27 teachers and seven school leaders, classroom and staff meeting observations, and artefact data, we reveal the invisible yet profoundly altering presence of NAPLAN and its consequences. Specifically, we analyse the ways in which NAPLAN practices, structures and technologies are both hidden and yet manifestly altering as a) practices that disappear into their uses, becoming unidentifiable and routine; and b) practices that follow well-used pathways that further embed particular uses. We counter rhetoric of NAPLAN normativity and complacency, instead demonstrating that its current uses, while not originally intended, are insidious and profound.

Full paper access

Daliri-Ngametua, Rafaan, Wescott, Stephanie and Heffernan, Amanda. (2023). On the uses and use of NAPLAN : the hidden effects of test-based data-centric accountabilities. Journal of Education Policy. pp. 1-18.

Contact the researcher

Dr Rafaan Daliri-Ngametua
Rafaan.Daliri-Ngametua@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Dr Rafaan Daliri-Ngametua research