By education reporter Natasha Robinson
Updated Tue 22 Aug 2017, 7:56am
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-22/national-trial-of-online-naplan-testing/8827600
Hundreds of schools around the country have begun trialling online literacy and numeracy tests for the first time after mass upgrades of IT systems.
The first students to sit the new trial NAPLAN tests have reported big differences in the way the testing takes place, with questions now tailored to the ability of the individual student and keyboard skills coming into play.
"There were definitely some ways where it was easier," said Taghe Nolan, a year five student at Middle Harbour Primary
School on Sydney's north shore, after sitting a trial NAPLAN writing test.
"You didn't need to scroll through a whole heap of paper and you had quite a lot of room to write everything that you wanted to.
"And being challenged makes you feel really good inside, like you're trying your hardest."
The online trials are being completed by about 500 schools this week in NSW, and more than 3,500 schools across the country will participate in coming weeks. The NSW Education Department said the online tests are designed to identify any problems with IT infrastructure and ensure that schools are adequately equipped to run the digital tests.
The executive director of NSW's Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, Jenny Donovan, said schools were polled prior to the online trials to find out how many laptops they had available and the capacity of their online connectivity.
"We felt fairly confident that with a little bit of additional machinery that was made available from the department that most schools would be ready, and so far that seems to be the case," Ms Donovan said.
"As we scale up the readiness testing effort, we'll find out more and more about what schools' issues may be.
"We've been polling teachers and students as we go, and students in particular are coming back to us saying they thoroughly enjoyed the experience, that they much prefer doing a test in an online environment."
Online system only benefits privileged schools: unions
But unions are heavily criticising the planned online rollout.
They hold concerns about ageing IT infrastructure in schools and say the online tests will advantage more privilegedschools.
The Australian Education Union's federal president Correna Haythorpe said teachers had raised significant concerns.
"Teachers and principals in our schools have told us that they are not ready to move to NAPLAN online," Ms Haythorpe said.
"We have resolved to oppose the implementation of this test and to seek urgent meetings with education ministers around the country to share those concerns."
The NSW Teacher's Federation has opened a hotline for teachers to give feedback on the online trials, which it says has been inundated with overwhelmingly negative reviews.
"We feel we and our students have been set for failure and forgotten," one teacher said.
"Confusing and concerning," was the assessment of another. "Staff are worried about timeframes, the lack of bandwidth and the ageing technology."
The NSW Education Department's polling shows that students are embracing the new digital tests.
In 12,500 responses from students within the first week of the school readiness testing, 78 per cent of students said they liked using a computer or tablet to carry out the NAPLAN tests, and 15 per cent said they didn't.
At Middle Harbour Public School, year five students encountered minor technical glitches as they completed a trial online test in writing.
Some of the provided headphones did not work and a few students had trouble connecting their laptops to the school's Wi-Fi and to the NAPLAN server.
Assistant principal Catherine Thompson said overall the testing had been successful.
"We're going to get a lot more data back to teachers, hopefully, that can really inform our teaching," Ms Thompson said.
The big difference in the new testing is that the online tests are tailored to a students' performance. If they answer questions correctly within a shorter timeframe, more challenging questions are presented. The inverse also occurs. In marking, more difficult questions are given a weighting against easier questions.
Schools will also receive the results of the test back within weeks, as opposed to months with the old paper tests, meaning that they can use the results to tailor their lessons and support for students.
For students at Middle Harbour, the upsides outweighed the negatives.
"There was definitely some benefits — the neatness of it was good," 11-year-old Alex Smith said. "If you weren't as neat there was no worrying about the markers not being able to read your answers. "But if you don't know how to touch-type you're looking up at the time and you're thinking 'I might not have enough time because you can't write as fast'."
First posted Tue 22 Aug 2017, 5:42am
