Does NAPLAN build resilience?
Aside from producing national benchmarks for literacy and numeracy in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, the NAPLAN experience presents a great opportunity to build adaptability and encourage a growth mindset in children and young people.
An overwhelming 95 per cent of the parents recently surveyed by Cluey Learning believe it’s important to build their child’s resilience. In fact, resilience has become one of the big buzzwords in contemporary parenting, with a thriving sub-genre of books and articles written around how to teach children to become more resilient, develop “grit” and overcome the negativity effect.
At the same time, we’ve seen quite a lot of parental ambivalence about the value of the NAPLAN tests, with 18 percent of parents planning to opt out of NAPLAN and a further 26 per cent considering it.
While I have complete sympathy for parents who want to protect their children from stressful situations, it can be a risky, and potentially even counterproductive, strategy. If children aren’t exposed to some challenge and pressure while they’re young and have the full support of their parents and teachers, they’ll arrive at adulthood without the necessary experience and resilience to manage stress. And while I’m not advocating that we throw them into the deep end, if we keep young people out of the pool, they’ll never learn to swim.
Fundamental to adaptability and resilience is the power to see experiences – even challenging ones – as opportunities to learn and understand how to cope with complex and stressful situations. With this in mind, tests like NAPLAN can be very useful experiences for children, as long as parents and teachers model a healthy and constructive approach.
Worryingly, our study showed that 53 per cent of parents purposely don’t mention NAPLAN to their children in the lead up to the tests. That means that there’s no opportunity to talk about how best to manage the tests themselves and any associated stress.
Advice for parents
Place the focus on how your child approaches NAPLAN, rather than on the results they achieve. Certainly, whatever you learn about their levels of literacy and numeracy will be useful, but there’s no need to focus them unduly on the final result. Use the tests as an opportunity to talk to your child about how to manage their nerves, how to approach the test itself, how to organise their time (as for some, and all of Year 3, it will probably be the first time they sit a test to a time limit).
NAPLAN offers a great opportunity to talk to your child about how you personally face challenges, and things that make you nervous, so that they understand that these kinds of challenges are a normal part of life and can be managed.
I’ve always believed in talking to students about how they feel leading up to NAPLAN and listening to them if they’re expressing concern. It’s through communication and sharing your own experiences that you will help your child to see challenges like NAPLAN as a normal part of life, and something that they can take in their stride. When they do take on something that challenges them and come out the other end, they’ll be more resilient.
Webinars on building resilience
To help parents navigate NAPLAN, Cluey will launch a free webinar series this March led by its Chief Learning Officer, Dr Selina Samuels. Register for a digital ticket to ‘NAPLAN and nerves’ at http://clueylearning.com.au/naplanwebinar.