FROM yesterday (Tuesday 10 May) hundreds of Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students at schools across the Western Plains will be taking part in the annual NAPLAN tests to show their level of learning compared to more than a million others across the country.

This year marks the final year of the test's transition away from traditional pen and paper, with all testing - aside from the Year 3 writing task - to be completed online.

According to the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA), 72 per cent of NSW schools have already been using the NAPLAN Online platform for one or more years, with the rest due to join them this year.

CEO of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Learning Authority (ACARA) David de Carvalho said doing the test online was a lot more engaging for students.

“The tailored testing means students are given questions that are better suited to their abilities, so they can show what they know and can do," Mr Carvalho said.

“NAPLAN online also has a variety of accessibility adjustments, so that students with diverse capabilities, learning needs and functional abilities are able to participate."

The NAPLAN Online test window is nine days between today and Friday 20 May.

Testing must be completed in a specific order with Years 3 and 5 doing writing, reading, conventions of language and then numeracy tests, while Years 7 and 9 do reading on day 1, then writing.

This year also marks the final time that the test will be conducted in May, with education ministers recently announcing it would be changed to March from 2023, so results would be available earlier in the year to inform school and system teaching and learning programs.

Mr Carvalho called 2022 the start of a "new era" for NAPLAN testing and said the outcomes of testing this year would be particularly important to gather further insight on a national scale into the impact COVID-19 has had after two years of disruptions to regular schooling.

“The last two years have been challenging for schools, parents and students, with disruptions such as lockdowns, floods and COVID cases keeping students out of the classrooms at times," he said.

One disruption not as talked about, however, is how smaller schools in regional NSW are adapting to the new testing conditions.

The App understands at least one school within the 11 LGAs of the Western Plains suffered internet issues on Monday 10 May, which would have led to possible disruptions to the online testing if they had continued into today or reappeared during the testing window.

Coonamble High School Principal Stewart Vidler said regional schools are definitely at higher risk of their NAPLAN test being disrupted than metro counterparts, however as one of the early adaptors of the online testing format during its pilot phase, they have adapted to it well leading to a smooth first day today.

"For the time I've been here, we've only done it online and today, things went really smoothly," Mr Vidler said.

"We've also been able to learn along the way - we use the whole testing period rather than just jam it into a couple of days and bring small groups into a designated space and put them in something comparable to an office cubicle so they can get in the zone."

Mr Vidler said the school was also lucky to have received a technology upgrade in the last couple of years, complete with new laptops and a bolstered internet connection that has a 4G backup if the main line goes down.

For other regionally-based schools, a low/no bandwidth solution is available. Schools are also able to schedule (and reschedule) tests across the nine-day test window.

To mitigate issues that have occurred during testing schools are able to access, with the approval of their local TAA, an additional two-week security window to complete testing. 

Despite this, NAPLAN data in recent years indicates that limited resources still does have an impact on results, at least for now.

In a NAPLAN National Report released by ACARA in December 2021, while there were no statistically significant changes observed during Covid impacted years from 2019 and 2021 at a national and state/territory level, there are differences apparent when assessing long-term gaps between different demographic groups, for example between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

Likewise, students in major cities outperformed those in regional areas in numeracy, reading and writing, and this gap has gradually widened in the last five years.

Regional students are also outperforming students from remote areas in these domains – this gap has remained stable since 2016.