Year 3 NAPLAN Practice Tests for 2027

Reading

Children read a set of short texts and answer questions about each one. The texts are a mix of story-like (imaginative) writing, factual (informative) writing such as a simple report or set of instructions, and occasionally something that tries to persuade.

Questions ask a child to:

• Find information that is stated directly - the most common question type at this level.
• Work out what a word means from the sentence around it, rather than from a dictionary.
• Make a simple inference - how a character is feeling, or why something happened, when the text implies it rather than saying it.
• Identify the main idea of a short passage or paragraph.
• Connect a picture, caption or heading to the text it belongs with.

Where Year 3 children lose marks: answering from memory or from the picture instead of from the words, and choosing an option that is true in general but is not what the text actually said.

Writing

Every student is given the same kind of writing task on the day - either a narrative (a story) or a persuasive piece (an opinion, backed with reasons). Students are not offered a choice, and Years 3 and 5 receive a different prompt from Years 7 and 9.

Marking looks at ten separate things, not just spelling. In broad terms they cover:

• Audience and text structure - does it do what that kind of writing is supposed to do, with a beginning, middle and end?
• Ideas - are there enough of them, and are they developed at all?
• Character and setting (narrative) or persuasive devices (persuasive).
• Vocabulary - word choice beyond the most obvious option.
• Cohesion - does it hold together as one piece rather than a list of sentences?
• Paragraphing, sentence structure, punctuation and spelling.

Because ten criteria are scored separately, a piece with weak spelling can still score well on ideas and structure - and vice versa. That matters for practice: it is worth knowing which criterion is costing marks rather than being told the writing was "good" or "bad".

Conventions of Language

This test is sat in two parts and students cannot go back to the spelling section once they have moved on. At Year 3 it covers:

• Spelling - common words, simple blends and digraphs, and words that do not sound the way they are spelt.
• Capital letters for names, places and the start of sentences.
• End punctuation - full stops, question marks and exclamation marks.
• Commas in lists.
• Simple homophones - there / their, to / too, hear / here.
• Word classes - recognising nouns, verbs and adjectives in a sentence.
• Sentence structure - whether a group of words is a complete sentence.

Spelling questions often show a sentence with one word wrong and ask for the correct spelling - so a child needs to spot the error first, which is a different skill from spelling a word read aloud.

Numeracy

Year 3 numeracy is one test with no separate calculator section. It draws on three areas of the curriculum:

• Number and algebra - place value to at least four digits, addition and subtraction, simple multiplication and division, halves and quarters, money and change, and continuing a simple pattern.
• Measurement and geometry - telling the time to the half and quarter hour, days and months, comparing length and mass, naming 2D shapes and 3D objects, symmetry, and simple directions and turns.
• Statistics and probability - reading a picture graph or simple column graph, and everyday language of chance such as likely, unlikely and impossible.

Where Year 3 children lose marks: questions with two steps, where the first answer has to be used in the second; and word problems where the number is easy but working out which operation to use is not.