There has been a bit of publicity about the results of the first nation-wide National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test results for school kids in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 (see http://www.naplan.edu.au/ for the program’s website). These national tests replace the state-based tests (which were in general different) and allow direct comparisons of test results across states.
Something quite nice about this is that I contributed to generating numeracy questions (for the years 7 and 9 tests). Unfortunately the final tests aren’t on the website – it’d be interesting to see the questions that were included in the final tests.
It would be interesting to see how educators use the results of the tests to inform their approaches to education and curriculum development.