Fatima Halloum
Thousands of year three, five, seven and nine students in Wyndham will sit the annual National Assessment Program –Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) this week.
The testing period will run from May 10 until May 20, and will examine student’s skills in numeracy, reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Good News Lutheran College NAPLAN co-ordinator Jessica Clarke said the school has helped prepare the 459 students expected to complete the assessment by helping them feel ready.
“Leading up to it we often have a practice test and then we get them to reflect on what parts of the questions or the actual test they felt maybe not as confident in,” Ms Clarke said.
“It’s more about getting them feeling confident with answering questions, the format of the questions, the type of questions, and the test conditions, we teach them to make sure they go back and read over the questions.”
Ms Clarke said they also focus on providing students with strategies and skills to monitor their wellbeing.
“We get them to do a mindfulness activity before they come in to get them to be present,” she said.
“We try and eliminate that anxious feeling coming into a test so that they are prepared for when they’re sitting exams.”
Ms Clarke said the school encourages students to treat testing days like any other normal day at school.
“It’s just another day and it shouldn’t be any different and they’re still gonna work as hard as they normally would and still going to try their best,” Ms Clarke said.
Principal Fiona McAuliffe said a good outcome for the college would be consistency across the year levels participating in the test.
“I like to see a balance across the four areas that are assessed so that we know that our students are getting a breadth of education, I don’t want to see them being excellent mathematicians if they can’t spell.,” Ms McAuliffe said.
“If we find one child we were missing that needs extra support in a specific area because of the NAPLAN results then it’s a success.”
