The National Assessment Program – Numeracy and Literacy (NAPLAN) is a general assessment test for Years 3,5,7, and 9. This kind of test is designed to test your skills in reading, spelling, numeracy, grammar, writing, punctuation, etc. School teachers make important decisions based on the results. This assessment test gives a bird’s eye view of how students are answering a set of English and Maths questions. Plus, ACARA gives two main reasons for conducting NAPLAN exams:

• To help schools bring improvements in teaching and learning based on students’ performance.
• To provide schools the ability to assess students’ achievements against benchmarked national standards.
• To compare students’ performance with those of other states and territories.

However, the education ministers have decided to bring changes in the NAPLAN exams that will be effective from 2023 onwards. This measure has been taken to give more support to students, teachers, and parents. It has been decided that by appearing for this test, students should be able to gain numeracy and literacy skills. Therefore, the Naplan test papers will also have to change accordingly to stay in tandem with the latest exam developments. The changes to the NAPLAN exam are one of the significant structural changes introduced by the testing program.

Changes Made in NAPLAN Test 2024

Below listed are the changes introduced to NAPLAN test by the educational ministers:

• NAPLAN will move to term 1, which earlier used to be term 2.
• NAPLAN 2024 will commence from 15^th March to 27^th March 2024. Earlier, the exam used to begin in the second week of May.
• The sample assessment papers of NAPLAN for years 6 and 10 in digital literacy, science, civics and citizenship will move from October to term 2. Schools will need to ‘opt in’ to these assessment papers every year if they wish to, and they will be phased in over the years. It will begin with science in 2024, civics and citizenship in 2025, and digital literacy in 2026.
• The results of these assessments will not be publicly available. However, they will be made available to participating systems or schools to support their learning programs.

Since the exam will begin in the month of March 2023, results will also be available to school authorities much earlier. The educational ministers made this thoughtful decision to help school authorities get deep insights into the knowledge that students are getting, and the kind of improvements teachers should make to support students in the coming years. Plus, the facility of opt-in to assessments will also play a huge role as it will provide necessary information to schools on how well students are able to retain knowledge in the key areas of digital literacy, civics and citizenship, and science benchmarked against national standards.

Talking about why NAPLAN has moved to Term one, ACARA published a statement where it said that – “(Moving NAPLAN to Term One) will mean results will be available to education authorities earlier in the year to inform school and system teaching and learning programs and will allow teachers to assess better what support students need for the coming year.”

So, are you appearing for the NAPLAN test 2024? Start your preparations from now. A lot of NAPLAN online practice test papers are available and you should give these mock tests to crack the exam. These question papers are close to real exams and you will get a holistic understanding of the test and the kind of questions being asked. Try to practice these papers till you get at least 95% of the questions correct. The best thing about NAPLAN test papers is that if you get a question wrong, you can find solved answers. This will help you in preventing the same mistakes and improve drastically.