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