Qld: Schools engage consultants ahead of NAPLAN tests

AAP General News (Australia)
04-30-2010
Qld: Schools engage consultants ahead of NAPLAN tests

BRISBANE, April 30 AAP - Three dozen Queensland schools have engaged consultants to
help boost their literacy and numeracy levels ahead of national testing.

Queensland students fared poorly in the first two National Assessment Program - Literacy
and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests in 2008 and 2009.

The 2010 tests are due to go ahead in two weeks, with an industrial commission hearing
on Friday expected to determine whether supervising teachers will be allowed to go ahead
with a boycott.

Last year Queensland ranked sixth in Australia compared to seventh in 2008, with more
students performing either at or above the national minimum standard in 17 of 20 tested
areas.

But the state still performed below the national average in all 20 areas.

A team led by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) education lecturer Dr Judy
Smeed is working with 36 state, independent and Catholic schools from Herberton in the
north to the Gold Coast in the south.

Dr Smeed said her team had developed a new tool called the Controlled Rapid Approach
to Curriculum Change (CRACC).

"We look at the data, what it is saying, what you identify as problems and what you
do to fix the problems," she said.

"It's a change process and we use data to inform what we are going to change."

Dr Smeed said it was not a matter of "teaching to the test".

"You are teaching skills that young people need to know," she said.

"If there is evidence that students are doing badly in a particular area, then failing
to address it is neglect."

Dr Smeed declined to comment on teachers' planned boycott over the "league tables"

produced from the results of the NAPLAN tests and placed on the MySchool website.

But she said the MySchool website had positives and negatives.

"In my 30 years in education, I've never heard so much conversation about student learning
and performance among principals, teachers and parents - and that has to be a good thing,"

she said.

"On the negative side, once you put data in the public domain, you have no control
over how people are going to interpret it."

NAPLAN tests cover students in Years Three, Five, Seven and Nine in reading, writing,
spelling, grammar and punctuation and numeracy.

AAP pjo/it/apm

KEYWORD: SCHOOLS QLD

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