by Emily Liccioni, Solutions Consultant at EP, former Languages teacher and instructional coach
What NAPLAN never shows about your Humanities students.
Key takeaways
- Humanities skills, like corroborating sources or interpreting spatial data, improve over a term, though rarely show up in the same data conversation as NAPLAN results, because they don’t compress into a single score.
- Most Humanities assessments capture achievement (how good was this response, on this day) rather than growth (how has this specific skill changed over time), and the two aren’t interchangeable.
- A simple three-step approach, Pick, Fix, Compare, can make Humanities growth visible: agree on a few transferable skills, describe each one consistently regardless of topic, then compare results against that same description over time.
- None of this requires new software or a new assessment system, just a shared, consistent way of describing a skill so it can be tracked from one term to the next.
Results week rolls around and staff meeting slides are NAPLAN graphs. Reading, writing, numeracy, all colour-coded and ready for the board. Then someone asks how History, Geography and Languages are tracking, and the room goes a bit quiet, not because nobody knows, but simply because nobody’s built a graph for what they do know.
Humanities teachers are doing incredible work to help students grow. A Year 9 student who can now build a source-based argument, or read a topographic map without help, has made real progress, and their teacher can usually tell you exactly how, in detail, off the top of their head. The trouble isn’t a gap in what Humanities teachers understand about their students, but that this kind of understanding is hard to hold up next to a NAPLAN graph in the same meeting.
I spent years teaching Languages before I moved into instructional coaching, and I recognise this exact moment from my own subject. Language growth doesn’t compress into a single test score either, and I lost count of how many staff meetings I sat in where that made our progress harder to point to, not less real. What follows isn’t a fix for something Humanities departments are getting wrong. Instead, I’ve outlined one way that I’ve seen Humanities departments make the growth they’re already tracking in their heads easier to show to someone else, in whatever format that conversation needs.
The skills are there. The evidence just looks different.
Growth in Humanities doesn’t sit in a single right answer the way a maths problem does. It sits in how well a student can weigh up two conflicting accounts of the same event, build an argument that actually uses its evidence instead of just gesturing at it, or read the story a map is telling before they’re told what it means. Empathy, negotiating meaning, corroboration, cause and effect, spatial reasoning: these are all crucial skills, and skills can improve in ways a class can track over a term. They just don’t compress into a single score the way a spelling test does. Because of this, these skills tend to go missing from the data conversation, even though they matter every bit as much.
Achievement data and growth data aren’t the same thing
Most Humanities assessments are built to answer one question: how good was this essay, this source analysis, this response, on the day it was handed in. That’s achievement data, and it matters, but it’s a single snapshot rather than a trend line. It doesn’t, on its own, show whether a cohort’s ability to corroborate sources is stronger in Term 3 than it was in Term 1, because the task in Term 3 is usually a different topic altogether, marked against a different set of criteria, by design. None of that is a criticism of how the assessment was set. It’s just what happens when the topic and the skill change together.
Literacy and numeracy testing gets its growth story because the thing being measured stays constant enough to compare over time. It’s worth asking whether Humanities could borrow that same logic, without needing to borrow NAPLAN’s format. The topic can keep changing. The skill being asked for doesn’t have to.
One framework to try: Pick, Fix, Compare
This is the version I’ve seen work when a department wants to try this approach. Take whatever’s useful, and leave the rest!
Pick three or four skills your department already values, and hold onto the same ones for the year. You’re probably already naming these in feedback, corroborating sources, building an evidenced argument, interpreting spatial data. The only shift is choosing a short list in advance and keeping it consistent across topics, rather than each unit getting its own fresh set of criteria.
Fix one shared description per skill, at a few different quality levels, so the whole team is pointing at the same thing. This is less about getting it ‘right’ and more about having a common reference point everyone can use. For ‘corroborating sources’, that might look something like:
- Developing (uses one source to support a claim)
- Consolidating (uses two or more sources and identifies where they agree)
- Extending (uses two or more sources, identifies where they agree and disagree, and explains why).
Yours might look completely different (and that’s fine), as long as it’s the same description, whether the unit is the French Revolution or the Cold War.
Compare against the skill, not the assignment. Once there’s a shared description, a Term 1 example and a Term 3 example are talking about the same thing, so it’s straightforward to put them side by side. That’s what can turn a folder of separate assignments into something closer to a growth story, and can give you something concrete to point to next time someone asks how the cohort’s tracking.
How to trial it this term
- Choose three or four skills your department already talks about, and keep the same ones all year.
- Write a shared description for each, at a few quality levels, in language that feels natural to your team.
- Try that same description against the next assessment, whatever the topic happens to be.
- At the next reporting point, put an earlier example and a current one side by side and see what it shows.
Where this goes next
None of this needs new software, and it doesn’t need to happen all at once. Sketching out a shared description for one skill is a fifteen-minute conversation at a faculty meeting. If your department gets to a point where you want it tracked properly, term over term, across every class, that’s exactly the kind of problem I spend my time thinking about with Education Perfect’s team, and I’d genuinely enjoy that conversation.
More practical thinking like this lives on the EP blog, if you’d like to keep exploring.
About the author
Emily Liccioni is a Solutions Consultant at Education Perfect. Before moving into instructional coaching, she spent years teaching Languages and Commerce, and that experience shapes how she works with departments now: less interested in telling teams what to do, more interested in helping them make the growth they’re already achieving easier to see and share. She remains a passionate advocate for languages education across Australia, and works with subject teams on curriculum transformation and student engagement more broadly.
