Parents often ask us about NAPLAN preparation. The NAPLAN is a standardised test administered at Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. It aims to assess if Australian children are developing the numeracy and literary skills needed to succeed in later life.
The NAPLAN is the only standardised test administered in Australia, before years 10, 11 and 12. It thus provides a crucial window into how your child is performing in school.
As with any standardised test, good preparation is essential to acing the NAPLAN. In this article we explore the areas that NAPLAN numeracy covers, and how to maximize your child’s performance in each section.
About the test
In Years 3 and 5, the NAPLAN consists of a single paper. There are typically between 35-40 questions. The questions are a mix of multiple choice and short answer response. Students have 40-50 minutes to complete the paper.
In Years 7 and 9, the NAPLAN comprises of two sections – a non-calculator section as before, and a section where the use of calculators is permitted. In each paper, students have 40 minutes to complete 32 questions.
Students are given a band depending on their performance. Higher bands are superior.
You may notice that students are not given much time to complete the paper. On average, students have just over a minute to complete each question. Getting stuck and spending too much time on a question may leave too little time to tackle the harder questions or to finish the paper. Good time management is essential to performing well.
Perfect your numeracy
NAPLAN is a challenge of both time and accuracy. Excelling in the NAPLAN starts from a strong grounding in arithmetic. Every question in the NAPLAN tests a different facet of numeracy. Students must be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide quickly and accurately.
If you are aiming for the highest band, you need to expose your child to questions above and beyond his grade. For instance, students as young as Year 3 are required to add and subtract 3 digit numbers. They must demonstrate a sound understanding of fractions to achieve the highest band.
To prepare, start working on numeracy long before the NAPLAN. Give your child plenty of practice, in the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). Eliminate careless mistakes and then progressively build up their speed, until calculations become effortless.
For the more advanced students, introduce them to content from higher year levels. Get them comfortable working with big numbers. Master 3-digit addition and 2-digit multiplication, before starting on advanced topics, such as fractions.
Angles, volume, money and time
Besides raw numeracy skills, students looking to do well need exposure to units of measure, angles, volume, money and time. Students may be asked to work out the volume of a solid, or read off the time on clock, for example.
These questions are usually not difficult. However, your child must complete these questions quickly to leave more time to tackle the more challenging problems in the paper.
Familiarise your child with these questions by working through problems in each topic one at a time. This might seem tedious, but once your child has seen every possible type of question that can appear, these questions will no longer pose a problem.
Analytical skills and problem solving
Ultimately NAPLAN assesses students’ ability to work with numbers in the real world. The NAPLAN features plenty of graphs, tables and maps for students to interpret. These can also take the form of word problems or logical puzzles.
Some of these word problems are wordy, making them challenging for students to interpret. Others might involve multiple steps and bring together many diverse skills.
To solve these problems, students need to understand the problem statement and what the question is asking for. They then need to express the problem in its numerical form and apply their numeracy skills to arrive at the right answer.
These are the hardest questions to prepare for, and most of our inquiries come through cases like this.
In some instances, students have strong numeracy skills but lack the problem solving skills to understand what the question is asking for. In other cases, students have a deficiency in an area of numeracy which prevents them getting the right answer.
The solution here is to teach numeracy and problem solving in tandem. Build up your child’s numeracy skills through targeted practice. At the end of each topic, immediately introduce relevant problem solving for that numeracy topic.
This method of teaching will force your child to think and reflect on the numeracy he/she has learnt and build problem solving skills. This helps students solidify their numeracy they’ve learnt and shows them how to apply these abstract concepts to real problems.
But more importantly, students who master problem solving learn to enjoy mathematics and the thrill of challenging themselves.
Our experience time and again has showed us that students who learn to love, and not fear mathematics end up outperforming their peers in the long run.
This article was written by the MathsHub tutoring team. If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to leave a comment below. If you would like to learn more about how we teach mathematics at MathsHub, you can contact us here.