11 November 2024

COVID lockdowns and school closures did not impact NAPLAN scores, says new study

| Oliver Jacques
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Teacher reading to male students

Students may have learned better from home during the COVID pandemic than we first thought. Photo: Michelle Kroll.

Standardised test scores across Australia were not significantly impacted by the havoc caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent study by researchers from the University of NSW and the University of Sydney.

Previous surveys have indicated most students felt hampered by lockdowns and having to learn remotely from home.

However, this did not significantly impact their National Assessment Plan – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results.

“Using NAPLAN test scores, we found that students in schools which operated remotely for an extended period performed similarly to students in schools which were closed for a relatively short period,” says Dr Nalini Prasad from UNSW Business School, who collaborated on the research with Dr Christian Gillitzer from the University of Sydney.

The study showed ACT students who took the 2022 NAPLAN tests had lost up to 77 days of face-to-face school classes during the previous two years, which was more than double the number of days lost by pupils in South Australia and Western Australia.

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However, the variation in NAPLAN scores between students in different states and territories was essentially the same as it was before the pandemic.

“The evidence from the data shows that students were not adversely affected by school closures in the short term,” Dr Prasad said.

“It’s important to understand that our research focused specifically on academic performance as measured by NAPLAN scores.

“While these findings are encouraging from an academic standpoint, they don’t address other crucial aspects of student development and wellbeing that may have been affected during school closures.”

The study looked at test scores of over a million students across different grade levels and regions.

During the pandemic, experts expressed fears that children in lower socio-economic households would suffer the most as they were less likely to have the technology and parental support to keep up with their studies when learning from home.

The Prasad-Gillitzer study suggests these fears may have been unfounded.

“There was little variation in NAPLAN performance for students from most socio-economic backgrounds,” Dr Prasad said.

“However, the data suggested some differences for Indigenous students and those from non-English speaking backgrounds, though this evidence was less conclusive,” she says.

The researchers say their findings open up conversations about education funding priorities.

“Post COVID, NSW implemented a program that aimed to help students catch up academically on lost schooling. The program was found to have had little effect on student performance,” Dr Prasad said.

“Directing resources toward longstanding inequities, rather than assumed learning losses, may yield better educational outcomes for all students,” she said.

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The study suggests that Australia’s strict COVID-19 policies, including extended lockdowns, may have played a role in mitigating the negative impact on education resulting in few school-aged children contracting the virus and not having to take time off school.

“Australia adopted a zero-COVID policy which used lockdowns – and other non-pharmaceutical interventions – pre-emptively to eliminate the transmission of COVID-19,” Dr Prasad said.

In contrast, many other countries closed schools only as a last-resort measure to alleviate the burden on the health system when COVID-19 cases surged.

“Per capita, COVID case numbers and deaths were considerably lower in Australia. Low COVID case numbers meant that students did not have to miss school due to contracting the virus,” she said.

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We should be entirely grateful to our teachers who worked their butts off to repurpose their lesson planning, schedule and delivery to keep the majority of students on track. We should also be grateful that the lockdowns are over and hopefully won’t be back. There’s more to school and childhood development than just the NAPLAN results.

So what I am hearing is teachers are doing no better than mum or dad at home and all the noise they make about ‘providing quality education’ and being ‘deserving of a pay rise’ every other week has just be entirely debunked and pay should actually be cut across the teaching profession until they can provide a service better than what could be provided at home.

You clearly must have been home-schooled if that’s what you are hearing.

We worked incredibly hard to make sure that we could provide education to our students at home during lockdowns. We changed entire units and created all materials to be available for students online and used new and old educational theories to help us foster engagement online. It is so disappointing to see this comment, if you seriously think it was home schooling (parents teach) and not remote learning (teachers provide learning) then it just goes to show how far teachers are yet to go in explaining basic information to the public regarding teaching and learning.

If teachers were as good as they like to think and tell everyone they are you wouldn’t explain basic information regarding teaching to the public, but unfortunately for you most of the public have been ‘educated’ by teachers….

That makes little to no sense Milo. Teachers do a wonderful, necessary, tough but important job…on the other hand, society could go without clueless culture wars conspiracy theorists and not miss a beat.

This all rides on the assumption that NAPLAN results mean something

I remember talking to Gai Brodtman soon after the federal Labor government introduced NAPLAN. It’s a way of measuring education levels across different schools and jurisdictions so that education departments can identify which schools are out performing others and zero in to find the reasons why. Then best practice can be developed from that info and rolled out to improve education as a whole.

The ACT Labor government used to laud our NAPLAN results in the beginning, until they started going south when compared to peer schools interstate. Then they started criticising the test rather than using the information to drive improvements in the education for kids in our public school system. It’s one of the reasons Canberra voters should have turned against the current government, but education outcomes seem to fall lower on the wish list than progressivism for too many voters.

‘Improvements in education’ and ‘progressivism’ are two of the most contradictory terms you could likely come up with so it stands to reason that the more progressive we get the less education we want….

The point being made, for those of us educated enough, was that the quality of education is falling as progressive agenda compliance overrides proper discourse practices. Covid compliance was a big example of the loss of critical thinking. Very young, sick and Old people have been dying frim the flu for a very long time.

What the inquiry should have focussed on was the impact on the younger cohorts and if there were indicators of something for future prevention procedures.

“falling as progressive agenda compliance overrides proper discourse practices”…oh get a grip on life. What colour is the sky in the inverse you culture warriors live in?

Have a look at the curriculum and tell me exactly where teachers have time to fit in any “agenda”?….seriously log off telegram or stop watching Sky News and go for a walk.

At the very least go and actually look up the curriculum and tell exactly which bits are “progressive” and why they’re bad.

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