What a Year 5 NAPLAN paper asks, and how to read one back.

The reading texts are longer and there are more of them, and a Year 5 question is more often about what a text implies than what it states. A child who can find a fact in a paragraph has done the Year 3 job. A child who can say what a character wants without being told is doing the Year 5 one. The distinction matters when reading the answers back, because a wrong answer that came from not finding the line and a wrong answer that came from finding it and misreading it are different problems, and only the second is really about reading.

In language conventions the spelling words are longer and less regular, and the grammar items lean further into sentence structure: which clause belongs where, which punctuation mark makes the sentence say what it means. Numeracy is still one paper, without a calculator, as it is at Year 3.

Writing is where the step is largest. The prompt is often the very one a Year 3 child sat the same morning. The criteria it is marked against are the same criteria used at Year 9; the writing test, explained sets them out. So at Year 5 the task is not different in kind, only in what a marker can reasonably expect of a ten-year-old: paragraphs that each do one thing, an ending that was decided on before the middle was written, a vocabulary chosen rather than reached for.

The paper is paper; the test is not

Every released Year 5 paper is a printed booklet. Since the move online, a Year 5 student reads, answers conventions and numeracy questions, and writes on a screen. That matters more at Year 5 than at any other level, because Year 3 still writes by hand and Years 7 and 9 have usually been typing for years. Year 5 is where a child is asked to compose a whole piece on a keyboard, to time, often for the first time under those conditions.

A 2016paper cannot rehearse that. It can show the shape of the questions and the prompt; it cannot show the screen, and it cannot tell you whether your child’s typing is fast enough to let the writing keep up with the thinking. The public demonstration tests on nap.edu.au show the screen. The two together are closer to the real thing than either alone. They are also, between them, everything that genuinely exists.

How to sit one honestly at ten

One paper, not the set. A ten-year-old sitting nine years of tests learns that NAPLAN is enormous, which is the opposite of true. Choose one year, sit one or two components, under the time printed on the paper, and stop.

For reading and conventions, mark it with ACARA’s key and then read the wrong answers together. Ask what the child was thinking, not what the right answer was. For numeracy, the same. For writing, there is no key. Sit down with the piece and the marking guide and read it against the criteria, or read it as a reader: does it hold, does the ending land, is there a sentence that surprised you.

If you want to see what a year of school added, the same year’s Year 3 paper is on the index too. Reading the two writing prompts side by side, and the two reading magazines, shows exactly what the test thinks a child should be able to do at ten that it did not expect at eight. That is a more useful comparison than any score.

What to look for in the response

Three things, in order of how much they tell you.

• Whether the writing was planned.A Year 5 piece that runs out of page mid-sentence, or ends with “and then I woke up”, was written from the first line forward. A piece with a shape, even a rough one, was thought about before it was started. Planning is teachable and it is the single largest difference between a Year 5 piece and a Year 3 one.
• Whether reading errors are inference errors. If the child found the right paragraph and still chose wrongly, that is the reading skill the test is actually probing, and the skill that carries into every subject after primary school.
• Whether spelling errors are in the words the child chose. A misspelt ambitious word is a better sign than a correctly spelt plain one. The criteria reward the attempt; the correction can come later.