Testing spelling -- Exploring NAPLAN

proofreading items that gave some students assistance. This difference in the construction
of difficulty has implications for those jurisdictions that measure distance travelled.
Figure 5: Year 3 results
Figure 6: Year 5 results
Figure 7: Year 7 results
Figure 8: Year 9 results
Another anomaly occurs at Year 7, and it also has implications for testing student growth.
In Year 7, and only at this year level, the ‘unidentified’ item words were presented first in
the testbook, an acknowledgment on the part of the test constructor that these items were
easier than the ‘identified’ item words. This was confirmed by our study, because in
dictation, where students are just asked to spell them, these Year 7 unidentified-error target
words do indeed have higher facility than the identified ones. This change in the relative
difficulty of the two NAPLAN item sets is a consequence of a particular combination of
confounding factors. Here, these unidentified-error items have high-facility target words
embedded in sentences that have significantly lower reading demands than other papers.
In contrast, the identified word items used on the Year 7 test have lower facilities than
those chosen for the unidentified. There are issues of item and test construction that need
to be explored further in another paper.
Error analysis
Queensland Studies Authority July 2009 | 9