Education Minister Jason Clare said the impact of screens and social media on students could be part of the problem. The NAPLAN tests were fully digitised in 2022 except for year 3 writing exams and for students with special needs. She said digital NAPLAN exams are pushing some schools to introduce computers into the curriculum earlier. University of Sydney secondary mathematics expert Bronwyn Reid O'Connor urged parents not to be alarmed by falling year 3 maths results which she said weren't statistically significant. "Mathematics is a field where we're using mass notation, we're drawing diagrams, we're creating graphs, we're showing working out, we're annotating diagrams, we're switching between these different types of representations," Dr Reid O'Connor told AAP.