NAPLAN: What will auto-scoring accomplish?
Published date: 1 May 2015
Testing children’s writing online using auto-scoring will change the way teachers teach and how students learn.
Robyn Cox, April 30 2015, The Sydney Morning Herald - COMMENT
The following opinion piece was written by the PETAA President following an invitation/request from the media. Therefore this is a solicited piece seeking PETAA’s President's views on the previously published article.
Question: Might the following teacher instruction become a reality?
‘Today, students we are learning to write for our NAPLAN test. Remember that this is not for real writing purposes but just so the computer
gets enough interesting adjectives and complex verb groups to push your writing into the top band. The school needs at least 50 per cent to get
into the top band to keep our MySchool ratings. Particularly you Richard Flanagan, no clever turns of phrase or engaging word pictures, and definitely no interesting sentence structures. We want plain good straight forward writing. After the NAPLAN tests we can get back to thinking about how to write with impact and engage our human audience with novel sentences and catching expressions. Thanks students, I know you'll understand!’
Read Robyn’s full letter here