This article provides information on how to choose and assign suitable PAT Early Years Maths test levels to your students. The following topics are covered:
- Importance of choosing the right test
- Previewing the tests
- Recommended test levels
- Supporting documents
Importance of choosing the right test
For an assessment to produce valuable information about students’ abilities, it needs to be appropriately targeted to uncover what students can do and understand, as well as what they cannot yet do and understand.
So, when a student responds correctly to approximately 50% of questions, the test is well targeted and provides the maximum information about the skills a student is demonstrating, and those they are still developing.
Previewing the tests
To make decisions about which test is most appropriate for a particular student or group of students, it is essential that you preview the test content:
- Click Students
- Click Tests
- Click Preview
The difficulty of a test and your knowledge of each student should be taken into consideration when selecting an appropriate test form. Curriculum appropriateness and the context of the classroom also need to be taken into account when making this decision.
There is often a wide range of ability within the classroom, so it is not necessary to provide all students in a class with the same test. Instead, the focus should always be on each student’s ability at the time of the assessment, not where they are expected to be.
Recommended test levels
The PAT Early Years tests have been named 'Start Foundation', ‘Mid-Foundation’, ‘Mid-Year 1’ and 'End Year 1' to indicate a suggested time to administer the tests to students and to communicate the progressive difficulty of each test. A brief outline of the content assessed by each test is included below:
- Start Foundation – students count, combine and share collections; recognise and order digits under 20; complete simple patterns; interpret positional language; compare quantities, lengths and sizes; and name simple shapes and order objects.
- Mid-Foundation – students recognise and order digits 0–99; skip count by 5s; solve simple problems involving addition, subtraction and sharing with numbers up to 50; interpret simple graphs; compare volume and mass; and identify common 3D shapes
- Mid-Year 1 – students recognise and order digits 0–999; identify and represent place value; solve simple problems involving addition, subtraction and sharing with numbers up to 100; represent problems with number sentences; complete 4-element patterns with rotation; skip count backwards by 2s; measure length in centimetres; identify simple features of 3D shapes; and compare data in a simple table.
- End Year 1 – students recognise and order digits 0–9999 including using number lines; solve simple problems involving addition, repeated addition, subtraction and sharing with numbers up to 100; skip count by 3s; identify 2D features in 3D shapes; insert, compare and combine data in simple graphs; identify the probability of events happening; and make simple interpretations of calendars.
There are some important caveats to this information:
The test names are guidelines only
As with all PAT assessments, the aim is to provide the student with a test that will enable them to answer about half of the items – or just over – correctly in order to establish what the student already understands and ‘where to next’ in their learning. It is strongly recommended that teachers familiarise themselves with the content of the four tests and use their expertise and judgement when deciding which test is most appropriate for each student.
Avoid unnecessary over-assessment of the same skills
Some state education departments in Australia already provide school-entry mathematics tests for Foundation students. These assessments may be mandatory and are usually a one-on-one interview style (with the teacher and student) but can be other tools such as observational records. There is no added value to be gained from running two school-entry assessments with a child in the same time frame; this is likely to just add unnecessary fatigue and stress to both teacher and students. Rather, evidence gleaned from any State-provided school-entry tests can be used to inform the teacher of which PAT Early Years Maths test is most appropriate to use in four to six months to see what progress has been made.
Learning progress is accelerated in the first two years
PAT Early Years Maths provides four tests across a two-year period, which aligns to testing times every six months, rather than once a year for other PAT assessments. This is because learning in the first two years of school generally occurs at a faster speed than learning at other times in formal schooling and requires more frequent monitoring of progress and potential gaps. The assessments are designed to be diagnostic and to pinpoint strengths and gaps early so that monitoring of long-term progress can be better followed. Therefore, administration times of the tests can be adjusted to the needs of the student. For example, by allowing longer than six months between tests for a struggling student (while using other resources and teacher judgement to indicate when they will be ready for the next test) and allowing a shorter period of three or four months for a student who is improving rapidly and working beyond their expected level.
A small amount of content is beyond the F–1 curriculum
Many important factors were taken into account when designing the content and structure of the four tests. They needed to capture the skills of as many students as possible, without containing too many items that would cause fatigue and stress. It is important to identify the skills of lower-performing students to establish a starting point for teaching and planning. For this reason, some test content is pre-Foundation level. It is just as important to identify how far ahead high-performing students are so that they are also given the appropriate learning path and do not become disengaged with content that is too easy for them. Therefore, there is some content that goes beyond the recommended year level, appearing sparingly in the first set of tests and increasingly in the final test. The End Year 1 test includes some questions at a Year 2 level. Teachers should use their own expertise and evidence to decide which students are capable of this test, remembering that they do not need to get everything correct in a PAT test for good measurement purposes.