Assessing Writing in Australia Secondary results, October 2022

This term, we ran primary and secondary writing assessments for Australian schools.

This blog will summarise the results of the secondary project. The primary results are here.

• 519 pupils from 4 schools took part in the Y8 assessment
• 201 pupils from 2 schools took part in the Y10 assessment.

The task

The task is in the figure below. Pupils completed the task in controlled conditions to ensure the writing was independent.

The results

As the judging was completed to a high degree of reliability, we can see the scaled scores of all the pupils on the same measurement scale, shown below. The measurement scale runs from approximately 300–700 and is consistent across both assessments.

The year 8 average was actually higher than the year 10 average. This was for two reasons. First, 2 schools took part in the year 8 assessment but not in the year 10, meaning that when we compare these two year groups we are not comparing like with like. Normally, this would not make a big difference, but it did on this occasion because the overall number of schools taking part was quite small.

When we compare just the two schools who took part in both assessments, then we see that the year 10s did do better on average than the year 8s. Here is a graph showing that.

With the measurement scale in place, we can estimate for every pupil their writing age and an indication of their NAPLAN band.

NAPLAN indicator

We have written before on this blog about the limitations of grades, and we think that the scaled score and writing age both provide you with more nuanced information about pupil performance. However, we also know that schools are keen to have at least some idea of where these thresholds might sit, so we have provided a statistical indicator as to where these grades are. We use national NAPLAN data to create these thresholds and we will have full details on how we do this in our webinar on the 27th October.

Here are the grade boundaries.

Writing age

We have also provided each pupil with a writing age. We’ve written more about how we created this here.

What’s next?

If you’d like to hear me discuss these results in more detail, sign up for our results webinar here. It’s at 4pm AEDT on Thurs 27th October.

We’ll have more analysis on this blog over the next few weeks.