NAPLAN questioned

Should we trust the results of the NAPLAN language test? when students were asked misleading, ambiguous and ungrammatical questions?

Analysis by language experts Fiona Mueller and Elizabeth Grant suggests that students could be forgiven for making mistakes on the ''language conventions'' test, which confused adverbs with conjunctions and used punctuation incorrectly.

Dr Mueller, an English teacher at the Australian National University, said that up to half the questions were flawed in terms of their accuracy or usefulness for teaching.

''I would suggest that parents and students take the results with a huge grain of salt,'' Dr Mueller said. ''They are a bad measuring instrument and unable to do what they were supposed to do, which is guide teachers.''

In one question, year 5 students were asked to choose ''which group of words can all be conjunctions'', but the only plausible answer contained the word ''then'', which is an adverb.

Other questions were illogical. In another year 5 question, students were asked to select words and punctuation to ''complete this sentence'', but the correct answer forms two sentences.

''It's absolutely unfair to expect students to sit these flawed tests in this environment,'' Dr Mueller said.

Flinders University literacy lecturer Barbara Nielsen said the tests ''cannot be considered diagnostic because they don't indicate why a child has not achieved any individual task''.

Guy Bayly-Jones, president of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, said the usefulness of the tests had been overestimated.

''They were designed to identify primarily those students who were falling by the wayside … In most cases, of course, these students were already known to teachers,'' she said.