About BandBoost
An Australian-built NAPLAN practice platform designed to help students identify and strengthen the specific skills that matter most.
Who we are
BandBoost is operated by Aria Infotech Pty Ltd, an Australian-owned company based on the Gold Coast, Queensland. We built BandBoost because we saw a gap between what NAPLAN reports tell parents and what parents actually need to help their children improve.
Our team combines educators who understand the Australian curriculum with developers who specialise in adaptive learning technology. Every question, every piece of feedback, and every feature on the platform exists because it helps students get better at specific skills — not just practise for the sake of practising.
We serve students in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9 across all four NAPLAN domains: Reading, Numeracy, Language Conventions, and Writing. Parents, tutors, and schools across Australia use BandBoost to provide targeted, curriculum-aligned practice.
Curriculum alignment
Every question on BandBoost is mapped to the Australian Curriculum Version 9 (ACARA). We do not write generic practice questions and hope they are relevant. Each question targets a specific micro-skill drawn directly from the curriculum content descriptions for the appropriate year level.
Our question bank contains over 4,000 questions organised by a micro-skill taxonomy. A micro-skill is a narrowly defined competency — for example, “identifying the main idea of a paragraph” in Reading, or “interpreting data from a two-way table” in Numeracy. This taxonomy allows us to pinpoint exactly which skills a student has mastered and which need further work.
Because NAPLAN is sat in Term 1, we calibrate our questions accordingly. Year 5 questions, for example, primarily assess advanced Year 4 content with early Year 5 concepts — matching what students would realistically have been taught by the time they sit the test.
Questions span all four NAPLAN domains: Reading (comprehension, inference, vocabulary in context), Numeracy (number, measurement, geometry, statistics), Language Conventions (spelling, grammar, punctuation), and Writing (persuasive and narrative prompts with structured rubric scoring).
How questions are reviewed
Every question on BandBoost goes through a structured review process before it reaches students. Questions are not generated and published automatically.
First, each question is written against a specific curriculum content description. The content description is verified against the Australian Curriculum V9 PDF to confirm it falls within scope for the target NAPLAN year level.
Second, questions are reviewed for accuracy. For Numeracy, this means the correct answer is independently verified. For Reading, it means the passage and answer options are checked for ambiguity. For Language Conventions, it means the grammatical rule is confirmed against the relevant curriculum strand.
Third, each question is difficulty-calibrated across three tiers: easy, medium, and hard. Easy questions test direct recall or straightforward application. Medium questions require a step of reasoning or transfer. Hard questions involve multi-step reasoning, unfamiliar contexts, or integration of multiple skills. This calibration is aligned to NAPLAN's own adaptive difficulty structure.
AI feedback methodology
BandBoost uses Claude AI (by Anthropic) to provide personalised feedback on student answers. This is not an open chatbot. Students cannot have free-form conversations with the AI. Instead, the AI reviews each answer and provides structured, curriculum-relevant feedback.
For multiple-choice questions, scoring is entirely deterministic — the student's answer is compared against the stored correct answer. No AI is involved in marking. AI is used only to explain why the correct answer is correct and why common wrong answers are tempting, calibrated to the student's year level.
For Writing tasks, the AI evaluates the response against a structured rubric that mirrors the NAPLAN writing marking guide. The evaluation uses a temperature setting of 0, meaning the output is as deterministic and consistent as possible. The AI does not improvise or vary its marking approach.
Student names are never sent to the AI. All AI interactions are anonymous by design. Feedback is calibrated by year level so that a Year 3 student receives age-appropriate explanations, while a Year 9 student receives more detailed analytical feedback.
NAPLAN disclaimer
BandBoost is an independent practice platform. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) or any Australian government body.
NAPLAN is a registered trademark of ACARA. Practice tests on BandBoost are created by BandBoost and are not official NAPLAN tests. Our questions are designed to help students practise skills assessed in NAPLAN, but they do not replicate or represent the official assessment.
Results and band estimates provided by BandBoost are indicative only and should not be taken as predictions of official NAPLAN results.
Get in touch
Have a question about how BandBoost works, our question content, or how we handle student data? We are happy to help.
Email us at [email protected]