This article provides information on how to choose and assign suitable PAT Early Years Reading 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 assessments 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 how the content of each test aligns with the skills of students is included below:
- Start Foundation – students are not yet reading but may recognise some words and letters.
- Mid-Foundation – students can read high-frequency words and some simple sentences with strong support from illustrations.
- Mid-Year 1 – students have increasingly fluent decoding skills and can read simple texts with some support from illustrations.
- End Year 1 – students are reasonably fluent readers and only pause to decode for unfamiliar, difficult words. Illustrations are increasingly less likely to be needed.
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 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 assessments 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 literacy tests for Foundation students. These assessments are usually a one-on-one interview style (with the teacher and student), but can be other tools such as observational records and may be mandatory. 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 add unnecessary fatigue and stress to both teacher and students. Rather, evidence gleaned from any state-mandated school-entry tests can be used to inform the teacher's decision on which PAT Early Years Reading test is most appropriate to use in four to six months’ time to see what progress has been made.
Learning progress is accelerated in the first two years
PAT Early Years Reading 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. One of the factors that contributes to the speed of learning in early literacy is the inclusion of ‘constrained skills’ content (see above). Remembering and applying letter sounds and symbols is a rote-type task (even when taught in context) and for most students is mastered relatively quickly, which speeds up their ability to start decoding and making meaning from text. It is important that teachers are as up to date as possible in regards to each student’s level in the two core areas of literacy (decoding and comprehension), as these are the crucial years for all students to become literate.
The PAT Early Years Reading tests are designed to be diagnostic and to pinpoint strengths and gaps early so that monitoring of long-term progress can be better followed in the PAT Reading 5th Edition tests to Year 10. Therefore, administration times of the tests can be adjusted to the needs of the student. For example, by allowing longer than six months between PAT Early Years Reading tests for a struggling student (while using other resources and teacher judgement to indicate when they will be ready for the next test), or by 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 for 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 PAT Early Years Reading test content is pre-Foundation level. And it is just as important to try to capture some sense of 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 contains four units and the final unit is 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.