While only occurring every few years, NAPLAN is actually a great bookend to look at the student growth over a number of years.
In isolation, NAPLAN is not that helpful but once you have combined it with a number of other assessments, its actually extremely helpful to look at student growth.
NAPLAN can be broken it down 1001 different way but by using the student raw data from each individual questions, we are able to use the data in an effective and constructive way.
Make NAPLAN a tool that you can use as single point of data over a longer period of time. Using NAPLAN as a stand alone tool is not as effective as adding all your other assessments, observations and other data in-between.
Did you create a strategy a certain year vs another year? Did you find that there was an increase in results and this was retained over two years?
NAPLAN is one of many tools that can be put on a single axis and tracked over a longer period of time.
There still is value in looking at the individual questions and the individual responses of a NAPLAN test. The NAPLAN data will give you an overview of the current areas that a student and/or class may need some additional practice.
Since NAPLAN asks such broad questions over many years, see if your students can remember the foundational work in all subjects. Sometimes they may not have covered this work for a long time but you know how important it is for moving forward. Its a good sanity check.
Just merge the current NAPLAN data within your current teaching plans. Its probably not going to alter it from all the other data that you have collected but since you have to do it, you might as well make use of the data.
Just remember, that this NAPLAN data is just another data point on the scale, almost the same as the 20 data points before this. Preparing teacher plans, it should not be used in isolation but combined with a number of other assessment programs and platforms.
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