NAPLAN testing has finished for another year for Port Stephens year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students, and the results will soon be a valuable tool for teachers and schools.
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The students had their reading, writing, numeracy, spelling, grammar and punctuation skills tested, to provide teachers with valuable data on where each student sits compared to their peers across the country.
Soldiers Point Public School principal Simon Parson said they tried to keep the school day as normal as possible for the students sitting the Naplan test.
"All we want for them is to do the best they can and for them to be comfortable and confident in themselves," he said.
Aside from the year 3 writing paper, all of the tests are completed online. Naplan was also slightly earlier this year compared to previous years which Mr Parson said was a little bit tricky.
"Most Year 3 students are pretty good on keyboards but for some students logging in can be a challenge," he said.
Mr Parson said Naplan is affirming what a classroom teacher already knows about their students, but it is also an opportunity to see how the students are tracking at a school-level.
"We can see the areas that at a school-level we're doing exceptionally well at or the areas that might need some improving," he said.
"We noticed about five-years-ago that our writing hadn't been going as well as it had been previously so we put on our thinking caps about what we could do to improve that."
To improve those results Soldiers Point Public School focused on making students vocabulary richer, which Mr Parson said helped the students writing to be more expressive.
"We did something across the school called say it again better and we actually saw quite a spike in our children's writing," he said.
"Now three quarters of our kids are getting results in the strong or exceeding categories."
For the first time schools will receive results just four weeks after the test period ends on March 25.
"It will be quite useful as it will allow us to do some earlier programming," Mr Parson said.