The chart is part of Michael’s Year 7 student report from the National Assessment Program. It arrived in the mail today from his former school at Kalgoorlie.
In May this year, national literacy and numeracy assessments were administered to students across the country.
While parents don’t receive actual test results, they do get to see how their children performed in relation to other children, like benchmarking.
In Year 7 there were five assessment areas: Reading, Writing, Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation, Numeracy.
The black dot shows where Michael was rated in numeracy. The triangle shows the national average and the pale blue box represents where 60 percent of the nation’s children ranked.
Above the pale blue box means the child performed well; if it’s below he or she has a problem.
In numeracy at least, Michael is a budding genius. That’s a proud parent’s exaggerated response to him ranking in the top 10 percent for the whole of Australia.
The numeracy assessment tasks measured student achievement across numbers, algebra, measurement, probability and space.
In English-related tests he didn’t perform as well. He was slightly above average for reading and spelling, slightly below for writing and grammar.
Michael has always done well at school. He doesn’t show much academic ambition, and at this early stage wants to be a professional soccer player when he grows up.
The NAP results tell us he needs to work a bit harder in English and that he has a talent for maths that should be nurtured.
