NAPLAN tests shouldn’t surprise Year 7 students, but they do. The pattern is consistent: students enter high school, adjust to a new environment, and suddenly face a national assessment that claims to measure literacy and numeracy. The pressure increases because parents and schools treat the result as a diagnostic verdict. The more useful approach is to deconstruct what NAPLAN actually demands and align preparation with everyday learning rather than a sprint of cramming.
For Year 7 literacy, the reading test does not assess recall. It measures a student’s ability to extract meaning from unfamiliar texts. The practical implication is that students who never read outside short classroom extracts are disadvantaged. Sustained reading develops stamina, and stamina matters because the NAPLAN paper pushes students through multiple text typee, articles, narratives, opinion pieces, with increasing complexity. The preparation strategy should focus on exposure: weekly reading that forces a student to articulate the main point, locate evidence, and identify tone. Those three skills map directly to the test questions.

Writing is more mechanical. NAPLAN rotates persuasive and narrative genres, and students often freeze because they can’t plan rapidly. Time-boxed writing drills—five minutes to outline, twenty-five to write—mirror test conditions. The constraint trains prioritisation. Marking against the NAPLAN rubric (audience, ideas, cohesion, sentence structure, vocabulary, punctuation) shows the student how assessors think. That transparency matters more than generic advice like “use descriptive language.”

Numeracy requires a different form of preparation. Many Year 7 students have learned content, but they make procedural errors under time pressure. NAPLAN rewards fluency. Short daily practice targeting common failure points—fractions, percentages, ratio, interpreting data—builds automaticity. Students should also learn to triage: identify low-effort marks first, skip time-sink problems, and return later. That is a test skill, not a mathematical insight, but it changes outcomes.

The broader point: preparing for NAPLAN should integrate into regular learning, not disrupt it. The test is predictable once broken into components—reading stamina, rubric-aware writing, and numeracy fluency. Treating it this way reduces anxiety and shifts attention from “performing” to demonstrating skills already in progress.

Anthea Preketes