This article provides information and advice about when and how frequently to administer PAT Maths Adaptive tests to your students.
Planning
As a school, you should be clear on your purpose for using PAT assessments and carefully plan your assessment approach, especially when monitoring student learning progress over time.
Most schools administer their PAT assessments towards the end of each school year to identify the skills students have attained, to identify specific areas where students need support in their learning and to measure growth from the previous year. This also corresponds with the time of year that the Australian norm or reference group data are typically collected, allowing for more meaningful comparisons.
Some schools choose to use PAT at the beginning of the year, placing a greater emphasis on teachers acting on the diagnostic information. Others use PAT both at the beginning and end of the year in order to maximise the diagnostic information available to monitor growth throughout the year.
Monitoring progress
For the purpose of monitoring student progress, a gap of 9 to 12 months between PAT testing sessions is required. Learning progress may not be reflected in a student's PAT scale scores over a shorter period of time. Longitudinal growth should be measured over a minimum of two years of schooling, or three separate testing sessions, in most contexts. This will help account for possible scale score variation, for example where external factors may affect a student's performance on a particular testing occasion.
PAT Maths Adaptive allows you to gather richer diagnostic information about what each student can do in a particular learning area and 'parallel' testlets minimise the chance of students being repeatedly exposed to the same content. For this reason, the PAT Maths Adaptive may be administered at times between those longitudinal measurement points. Scale scores from these interim sittings would not necessarily be considered when monitoring progress over a matter of years.