Aus: NAPLAN results have stalled in literacy and numeracy

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

NAPLAN results show literacy, numeracy skills have stalled despite record government funding

STEPHANIE DALZELL
WED AUG 03

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-0 ... ed/7683244

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Yvonne Meyer noted:

The best reporting, IMO, is from The Age, (pasted below). Not shown here is the photo showing the teacher with phonics flashcards.

2016 NAPLAN RESULTS NOT GOOD ENOUGH, SAYS FEDERAL EDUCATION MINISTER SIMON BIRMINGHAM

The performance of Australian students in literacy and numeracy has flatlined for the past three years despite a significant boost in education funding over the same period.

Preliminary data from this year's NAPLAN tests reveal negligible improvement, with federal education minister Simon Birmingham calling for a fresh approach to teaching young people.

"We need to focus on evidence-based measures that will get results for our students because today's results once again show that, despite significant funding growth, we are not getting sufficient improvements in student outcomes," he said.

The 2016 results show reading scores have increased by 0.4 per cent since 2013, writing scores have declined by 0.2 per cent and numeracy scores have risen by 1.26 per cent. Over the same time period, federal school funding has increased by 23.7 per cent.

Victorian students achieved the best writing results in the country across all year levels. They also performed strongly in numeracy, topping the country in years 3, 5 and 7 and finishing second in year 9. But their achievements were not statistically different from 2015.

Birralee Primary School in Doncaster hopes to buck the trend.

It was identified as a "high gains" school earlier this year, with its 2015 results all substantially above or above average.

Principal Ashley Ryan said the school's success came down to clear, straightforward instruction, teaching the rules of spelling and grammar and using phonics – where words are sounded out.

Every morning, year 3 and 4 students sound out "wh" "igh' and 'ew" as their teacher Dee Groves holds up flashcards. Similar exercises are carried out across the school.

Then the students move on to grammar. "Who invited the comma?" Ms Groves asked the class on Tuesday. "William Shakespeare," a student replied. "And why did William Shakespeare invent the comma?". "So that the actors knew when to take a breath in his plays," Benji chimed back.

Long-term data shows students have made overall gains since NAPLAN testing was introduced in 2008, but the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority chief executive Robert Randall said the recent stagnation in results was a concern.

"Plateauing results are not what we should expect or assume from our education systems," he said.

"Literacy and numeracy are the foundations of learning in and beyond school. Literacy and numeracy achievement needs to improve to ensure the wellbeing of individual students and the country as a whole."

"It takes three to five years for change in practice to clearly show up in a change in learning," he said. "Sometimes it can take up to seven years to turn a school around."

Victorian education minister James Merlino said that while Victoria continued to be one of the highest-performing states in Australia, there was room to improve.

The state government has set an ambitious target to ensure that 25 per cent more year 5 students reach the highest levels of achievement in reading and maths in the next five years. It wants to see similar progress among year 9 students over the next decade. "These are ambitious targets but we are confident of meeting them, which is why we've made the largest ever investment in needs based funding of $566 million for Victorian government schools and are introducing programs to help our disadvantaged kids succeed in their education," he said.

Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe stressed the importance of continuing the needs-based funding recommended under the Gonski review.

"The single biggest problem in Australian education remains the unacceptable gaps in achievement between students from different backgrounds and locations," Ms Haythorpe said.

"The evidence shows delivering the full Gonski funding is our best chance to ensure all schools are properly resourced to meet the needs of all kids and address these achievement gaps."

University of Melbourne education expert Professor Patrick Griffin said reforming teaching practice would lift student performance.

"Some schools are making great progress by changing teaching practice," he said. "But it's one thing to make a change and another to sustain it."

Individual students will receive their results from mid-August, a process likely to be quicker from next year when online testing starts to roll out across the country.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/2016- ... qjd8e.html

As an aside, this has generated a conversation around who really 'invented the comma - not Shakespeare apparently!' - there is this information on the internet:

Aldus Manutius?

He invented it. The comma's ancestors have been used since Ancient Greece, but the modern comma descended directly from Italian printer Aldus Manutius. (He's also responsible for italics and the semicolon!) In the late 1400s when Manutius was working, a slash mark (/, also called a virgule) denoted a pause in speech.

http://blog.dictionary.com/comma/

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

For those who don’t subscribe to The Australian - here is Dr Jennifer Buckingham yet again:

NAPLAN results show core learning skills are in retreat

Jennifer Buckingham, Opinion, The Australian, August 3, 2016

The latest NAPLAN results are a wake-up call for the whole ­country.

While there has been some improvement in mean scores in Years 3 and 5 since NAPLAN began in 2008, there has been no improvement to speak of in Years 7 and 9. In fact, Year 7 and 9 writing scores have declined significantly since 2011 in several states.

In terms of the proportion of children who failed to achieve the National Minimum Standard (NMS), there has been no improvement in any year, in any domain. This is especially troubling because the NMS is extremely low against international benchmarks such as the Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).

In PIRLS 2011 (the most recent report), 24 per cent of Year 4 students were below the acceptable benchmark for reading literacy, compared with 4.9 per cent of Year 3 students below NAPLAN NMS and 6.9 per cent of students below Year 5 NMS. These NAPLAN percentages have barely shifted in nine years.

This suggests the NAPLAN NMS measure severely underestimates the number of children struggling with basic reading literacy. New PIRLS data was collected this year and it will reveal if this discrepancy still exists.

What is going on? Billions of dollars of extra funding has gone into schools in recent years, especially since the Gonski funding package was introduced.

Yet there appears to have been little pay-off in what should be the core job of schools — teaching children to read, write and do maths. That is because extra funding has little effect on student achievement if teachers don’t use the most effective teaching methods in classrooms, where children spend most of their school day.

The NSW government’s Early Action for Success program is an example. Its central literacy program, called ‘L3’, was not properly trialled and tested before being implemented to more than 400 schools across NSW. It does not meet the criteria for evidence-based reading instruction identified in scientific research, including an absence of systematic phonics instruction.

According to the latest published report on EAfS in 2014, as many schools had negative movement in their NAPLAN reading scores as had positive. Funnelling more money into programs that are not truly evidence-based will not help children achieve higher literacy levels.

The NAPLAN reading assessment is a broad measure that flags only that a student is having difficulty — not why.

The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC) proposed by the Australian government earlier this year will be an early marker of which children are struggling with this fundamental skill and which schools are not teaching it well.

Since the Year 1 PSC was introduced in English schools in 2012, the failure rate in Year 2 reading comprehension tests has declined by 30 per cent. We can only hope it will have the same effect here.

Dr Jennifer Buckingham is senior research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies www.cis.org.au and director of the FIVE from FIVE reading project ww.fivefromfive.org.au

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion ... 99e1ba32ee

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Pamela Snow responds to the issue of the NAPLAN results and possible causes - the need to look at the 'evidence' that stares us, quite frankly, in the face!

NAPLAN and the lost keys

http://pamelasnow.blogspot.co.uk

...It is disappointing that teacher educators are not coming out in force calling for a change of tack to providing more evidence-based content in teacher pre-service education. Non-evidence-based approaches such as the much-loved (by teachers and teacher educators) three cueing strategy rarely (never?) rate a mention in the commentaries around poor NAPLAN performance, and nor does a need for implementation of the recommendations of the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy.

Instead, we see condemnation of the test itself ("We're doing poorly, so the measure must be flawed - quick, whip up a frenzy about testing being bad for kids") and glib and predictable calls for more money, usually in the form of Gonski funding, e.g. ...

As Pamela states on her tweet:

Better approaches to literacy education are hiding in plain sight.

Professor Pamela Snow is a member of IFERI's Advisory Group. You can learn more about Pamela here:

http://www.iferi.org/professor-pamela-snow/

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Another piece on the battle between different reading instruction approaches by Timna Jacks in 'The Age':

Two-thirds of Catholic schools teach ineffective reading program

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victo ... qoo32.html

The 'reading wars' have been reignited by claims that primary school teachers are still not teaching students how to read and write properly.

Around two thirds of nearly 500 Victorian Catholic schools are still teaching Reading Recovery, a program which was found to be ineffective for most students in a recent NSW Education Department report.

One issue not directly mentioned in the article is the 'multi-cueing reading strategies' which is where the different teaching approaches are truly different.

Reading Recovery fully incorporates multi-cueing reading strategies in its methodology and teacher-training and RR teachers provide children with literature to read independently that they cannot read without having to resort to guessing words from multi-cueing.

The Systematic Synthetic Phonics Teaching Principles, in contrast, include the teaching of the complex English alphabetic code 'systematically' and 'explicitly' and preclude the use of multi-cueing guessing-words strategies!

This might make no difference to some children's capacity to read well, but multi-cueing guessing strategies set many children up to fail and to acquire a reading habit that takes children away from the study of the print and, instead, to guess (often wildly) from cues such as pictures, the context of the sentence or text and from just the first letter or letters of the printed words.

The research on reading has consistently shown that such guessing strategies will damage many children's long-term reading reflex - and this may be unbeknown to many teachers and parents - and it is even a misunderstood issue with many teacher-trainers.

This is why the debate and arguments around reading instruction and different approaches is still ongoing despite the suggestion by some academics and others that the 'reading wars' are over. Sadly, the reality of teaching provision and teacher-training - AND READING RESULTS - show us otherwise.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Alison Clarke who was mentioned in the Timna Jack's article in The Age has now written a blog posting referencing the article. Alison explains some background to the misguided belief in the 'multi-cueing' reading strategies - often referred to as the 'three cueing system':

http://www.spelfabet.com.au/2016/08/mul ... r-readers/

Multi-cueing: teaching the habits of poor readers

I’m mentioned in The Age newspaper today because as usual I’ve been talking to anyone who will listen about the need for more and better phonemic awareness and phonics teaching for beginning and struggling readers and spellers.

I was a bit sad that the article started off saying that “the ‘reading wars’ have been reignited”, as I’m not interested in war with anyone. I just want teachers to be given the skills and resources they need to teach all but a tiny minority of children to read and spell, confidently and well, on their first attempt.