National Reference Test 2021: Performance across Content Areas--Research into the Possible Effects of COVID-19 Disruption across Different Areas of the Curriculum

The main National Reference Test (NRT) outcomes, reported in the 2021 National Reference Test Results Digest (ED627839), show overall performance on the NRT in English and mathematics over time indicating how the subjects may have been impacted as a whole. This study provides additional analysis of the NRT 2020 and 2021 data to explore whether different areas of the curriculum have been differentially impacted by the disruption to teaching as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This may highlight areas that were more difficult to learn at a distance, were given a lower priority than others, or required more explicit teaching of concepts and/or skills. Key findings include: (1) There was no evidence of any clear differences across the English curriculum areas, suggesting that performance on the NRT in 2021 was comparable to that of 2020 across all areas of the English curriculum assessed in the NRT; (2) Performance fell by a similar amount for all areas of the curriculum in mathematics between 2020 and 2021, suggesting that the disruption to teaching and learning caused by the pandemic did not have differential impact across the curriculum; and (3) The absence of a clear pattern in changes in performance at the curriculum level for English and mathematics is perhaps unsurprising given that the extent of COVID-19 pandemic-related disruption was variable at the school, class and even student level. [For the related appendices, see ED627841. For the first report, see ED627842.]