Online testing and educational inequality: Evidence from a national standardized test in Australia

This paper investigates the effect of transitioning the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), a standardized assessment of student literacy and numeracy skills in Australia, to an online format on student test scores, with a particular focus on the disproportionate impact on lower-income groups. Utilizing school-level administrative data, we construct a panel of test scores across subjects (reading, writing, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and numeracy) and grades (3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th) for 10,529 schools over the period from 2008 to 2023, yielding a total of 1409,955 observations, with 919,934 from public schools. NAPLAN began its transition to online testing in 2018 and, by 2022, reached record-high participation, making it the largest online testing program in the world. Employing a staggered Difference-in-Differences methodology, the study shows that the shift to online testing is associated with a significant decrease in test scores, with this adverse effect being more pronounced among students from lower-income backgrounds. Specifically, online testing decreases average test scores by between 0.05 and 0.25 standard deviations (depending on the specification), while test scores from schools in the lowest income quintile are found to be between 0.10 and 0.17 standard deviations lower than those in the highest quintile.