Five Things We Wouldn ’ t Know Without NAPLAN ( continued )
ARTICLES
Five Things We Wouldn ’ t Know Without NAPLAN ( continued )
Focusing just on the first point , here are five things we know a lot more about because of NAPLAN .
1 . Achievement gaps for Indigenous students
Indigenous students don ’ t achieve at the same level as their non- Indigenous peers . While this has been known for decades , we would not know just how large some of these gaps are without NAPLAN , or how the gaps have changed over time .
At a national level , year nine Indigenous students are on average three years behind non-Indigenous students in numeracy , 3.4 years behind in reading , and 4.2 years behind in writing . of the gap tripled , from one year and three months in year three to three years and eight months in year nine .
Even more concerning was the finding when we compared students with comparable capabilities early in their schooling . From the same year three starting score , students in disadvantaged schools fall more than two years behind by year nine , with potentially high-achieving students missing out the most .
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Numeracy
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Students with similar early potential do worse in disadvantaged schools , especially high-achieving students .
3 . Comparison among states an NAPLAN scores from 2010 to 2017 ( 2011 to 2017 for Writing ) translated to equivalen Indigenous students are three to four years behind by
year nine
Translating NAPLAN scores into equivalent year levels makes it much easier to understand and compare performance across student groups , but the Indigenous gap is so large that no fancy mathematics is needed : year nine Indigenous students scored on average 465 in NAPLAN writing in 2017 , below the 480 non- Indigenous students scored in year five .
The states and territories are responsible for running school education in Australia . Different states and territories take different approaches . In theory , this means jurisdictions can learn from each other , but this requires accurate comparisons , which take account of socio-economic differences . For example , parents in some states have higher levels of education than in others .
On a like-for-like basis , comparable students are achieving at very different levels depending where they live in Australia .
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The gaps are even larger in very remote areas where Indigenous students are more than seven years behind in writing . |
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NSW |
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WA |
SA |
2 . Progress gaps for students in disadvantaged schools |
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Students in disadvantaged schools perform worse . Again , not news .
What ’ s more of a surprise is that , when we tracked a cohort of Victorian students across all four of their NAPLAN tests , the size
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States and territories have very different levels of achievement when compared on a like-for-like basis .
36 SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL NEWS VOL 67 NO 2