From: Timothy Gaden gaden@fastmail.

com
Subject: 'Back to basics' is not our education cure - it's where we've gone wrong
Date: 15 December 2019 at 6:17 am
To: Tim Gaden gaden@fastmail.com

https://www.smh.com.au/national/back-to-basics-is-not-our-education-cure-it-s-where-we-ve-gone-wrong-
20191211-p53iu1.html

'Back to basics' is not our education cure - it's

where we've gone wrong
Richard Holden and Adrian Piccoli December 13, 2019 — 10.43am

A "back to basics" response to the latest PISA results is wrong and ignores the other data
Australia has spent more than 10 years obsessing about – NAPLAN. The National Assessment
Program – Literacy and Numeracy is all about going back to basics, but it is such a narrow
response that it risks making the global standing of Australian school students in future PISA
results even worse, not better.

Year 7 students in their NAPLAN test. Adam McLean

If anything, available data since 2008 from NAPLAN suggests that most student understanding of
"the basics" has improved. However, as shown by PISA – the Program for International Student
Assessment – they struggle to apply basic concepts to related problems that they haven’t
specifically practised.

A further indication that a back-to-basic response is mistakenly narrow is the fact that high-
performing students, who are showing a decline in Australia in PISA, don’t by definition have
trouble with the basics.

To understand this difference, it is firstly important to understand what PISA is testing. As the
chief executive
of the Australian Council for Educational Research, Geoff Masters, has pointed out: “PISA does
not assess students’ abilities to recall facts or basic literacy and numeracy skills. Instead, it
assesses the ability to transfer and apply learning to new situations and unseen problems. This
requires an understanding of fundamental concepts and principles, as well as the ability to think.”

NAPLAN, by contrast, does test basic literacy and numeracy. However, unlike our declining PISA
performance, there has been no downward slide in NAPLAN results. If anything, the year 3
NAPLAN cohort from 2013 did better than their counterparts from five years earlier.

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Whatever the reason for the decline in PISA results, it is not mirrored by a corresponding decline
in NAPLAN scores for the same cohorts of students. So what is going on?

One explanation is that for 10 years Australia has focused on basic skills through the obsession
with NAPLAN and that this has come at the expense of teaching more practical applied skills and
problem solving.

No one should really be surprised by this disconnect between basic-skills abilities measured by
NAPLAN results and the broader, higher-order skills tested by PISA.

The warning about the way NAPLAN "narrows the curriculum" and the adverse effects of
"teaching to the test" began when NAPLAN and the MySchool website were first floated as an
idea. NAPLAN and the narrow range of knowledge and skills it tests is what gets noticed in
Australia, so it’s what gets done.

There can be no dispute that students need to master basic literacy and numeracy skills and that
we should do better at the basics. Without those skills they have no foundation for more
advanced learning.

For 10 years NAPLAN has done exactly what basic economic tells us it will – created high-
powered incentives for schools to make sure students are equipped to do well in NAPLAN tests.

The MySchool website makes school-level NAPLAN results readily available and highly salient.
Principals and teachers naturally respond to those incentives for fear of losing good students to
other schools and to satisfy the demands of education regulators and parents.

Furthermore, governments measure their own performance in education based on NAPLAN

results and look
for every possible policy option to improve those results.

Taken together, the competing trends in NAPLAN and PISA results suggest we need to better
transition students from basic skills development into higher order conceptual skills and put the
necessary curriculum and resources behind that transition.

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One option to consider as part of the current review of NAPLAN is to continue the literacy and
numeracy sample-based "basic skills test" in years 3 and 5 and move to more complex problem-
solving, PISA-style, sample-based tests in years 7 and 9.
solving, PISA-style, sample-based tests in years 7 and 9.

We set the bar too low for ourselves if the main policy response to PISA is "back to basics".
Australia needs to be more aspirational than to simply measure our system on how well our
children read and write. We absolutely have to expect that as a baseline.

If we want to focus on those higher level, applied skills that students really need when they leave
school, then the curriculum and the testing regimes that surround it need to focus on those skills.

In an increasingly globalised and automated world, problem-solving ability is the scarce skill. It is
the skill that will generate the long-run productivity growth required to maintain high standards of
living.

The good news for Australia is that we don’t need to make a choice between "basic skills" and
"higher-order skills". We are more than smart enough to have both.

Richard Holden is professor of economics at UNSW Business School and Adrian Piccoli is
director
of the Gonski Institute for Education at UNSW, and Professor of Practice in the School of
Education.