Associate Professor Michael Nagel, an expert in human development and the psychology of learning at the University of the Sunshine Coast, says the review is a good start, but favours eliminating NAPLAN altogether. “The research around standardised testing [like NAPLAN], is pretty conclusive, in that standardised testing paradoxically leads to much lower standards,”  he said.

“I think there’s three [major problems with NAPLAN]. The first is that standardised tests are limited in determining what a student actually knows or has learnt, so they don’t give us a real good understanding of what a student knows.

“The second thing is that they quickly become a high-stakes endeavour, making for a competitive environment, and they’re used to compare things that they shouldn’t be used to compare.

You should never take a diagnostic tool, which is what NAPLAN’s meant to be, and use it to compare. And that’s what happens: we use it to compare students, to compare classrooms, schools – god forbid we start comparing teachers.

“The most worrying thing in my professional opinion is the sheer stress [NAPLAN] puts, not just on the students, primarily students, but also on teachers and parents.

“We should be looking to examine what the children know in ways that don’t create stomach pains and nausea; we have studies that tell us that NAPLAN does this to children.”

Associate Professor Nagel says that the best way to assess student outcomes is to get out of teachers’ way, and let them do it in cooperation with parents.

“In this country we have a tendency when things don’t look well to bag teachers.

“In Finland, in contrast, they have a tendency to [trust teachers] in what they do, and I think the more we would trust teachers, and allow them to make determinations about where kids are at, in conjunction with working with parents, the better off we would be, because no two kids are the same, and teachers are trained to look at what kids can do, what they can’t do, and help to move them along.”