This article provides information and advice about when and how frequently to administer PAT Reading 5th Edition tests to your students.
Related article: Choosing the right PAT Reading 5th Edition test
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.