The information provided by the PAT Early Years Reading reports is intended to assist you in understanding students' abilities in the learning area, diagnosing gaps, strengths and weaknesses in students' learning, and measuring learning progress over time.
This article explains the results available from PAT Early Years Reading:
Early literacy skills
Although scale scores are an excellent way to track growth over time in the PAT Reading 5th Edition tests, they should not be viewed in the same way for PAT Early Years Reading. This is largely because the PAT Early Years Reading testing times are more frequent, with a shorter duration in between. Furthermore, the content structure changes across the four tests from a large component of ‘constrained skills’ in the first tests to only ‘unconstrained skills’ in the final test. This means that the PAT scale scores of students who are significantly stronger in one skill over the other may not appear to reflect growth because the scale score represents overall ability across both skills. PAT Early Years Reading results are best understood by looking at students’ responses by each of the strands to see where students’ levels are in each skill. There are five strands and two sets of skills. The table below shows how they align.
| Strand | Skill |
|---|---|
| PR (print conventions and environmental print) | Constrained (stops when mastered) |
| PH (phonics and phonemic awareness) | |
| VO (vocabulary) | Unconstrained (lifelong) |
| LC (listening comprehension) | |
| RC (reading comprehension) |
While students need to master the set of ‘constrained skills’ to be able to decode for reading, the other set of two ‘unconstrained skills’ (Vocabulary and Listening Comprehension) contribute to the ability to make meaning from reading. These two sets of skills should be assessed and taught simultaneously to achieve sound reading skills in students without one being given priority over the other. By viewing the reports by strands, teachers will be able to see if clusters of incorrect or missing responses are appearing and begin to map some ‘where-to-next’ strategies. It is also a good idea to use strand data to create class literacy groups based on ‘like needs’ rather than ‘like abilities’ to encourage progress and movement between groups.
Not all relevant content and skills can be included in the four tests and still keep them within a 30-minute time frame for each. The data generated should be regarded as indicative and teachers should always follow up with individual students if the data does not match other evidence that the teacher has gathered. Although the data and scores from PAT Early Years Reading cannot be directly compared with the data provided by other assessment tools, the information that is extracted from various sets of data (for example, strong listening comprehension skills but weak decoding skills) can be compared and recorded to build a rich student profile.
Scale score
A scale score is a numerical value given to a student whose achievement has been measured by completing an assessment. A student's scale score lies at a point somewhere on the achievement scale, and it indicates that student's level of achievement in that particular learning area — the higher the scale score, the more able the student.
Regardless of the test level or items administered to students, they will be placed on the same scale for the learning area. This makes it possible to directly compare students' achievement and to observe students' progress within a learning area by comparing their scale scores from multiple testing periods over time.
A score on a Reading scale, for example, has no meaning on the Maths scale. In fact, the units of the scale will have different meanings for each scale. This is because these units are calculated based on the range of student levels of achievement, which vary widely between learning areas.
Achievement bands
Students in the same achievement band are operating at approximately the same achievement level within a learning area regardless of their school year level.
Viewing student achievement in terms of achievement bands may assist you to group students of similar abilities. By referencing the achievement band descriptions, you can understand the types of skills typical of students according to their band.
Item difficulty
Item difficulty is a measure of the extent of skills and knowledge required to be successful on the item. This makes it possible to allocate each test item a score on the same scale used to measure student achievement. An item with a high scale score is more difficult for students to answer correctly than a question with a low scale score. It could generally be expected that a student is able to successfully respond to more items located below their scale score than above.
Item difficulties are estimated based on the performance of individuals with a range of abilities who respond to that item, first at the item trial stage and later verified in real test results. The concept being assessed in the item is one aspect of item difficulty. Other factors may combine to make an item more or less complex. For example, the level of abstraction, the number of steps required, whether the question involves problem-solving or computation, the question context, the required precision of response, cognitive load, etc. An item assessing a concept that is introduced earlier in the curriculum may still be quite complex. Conversely, an item assessing a concept introduced later may be simpler.
By referencing the difficulty of an item, or a group of items, and the proportion of correct responses by a student or within a group, it may be possible to identify particular items, or types of items, that have challenged students.
Australian reference groups
PAT reference group data are available as a sample against which student achievement can be compared.
Like the nationally representative norm samples available for other assessments, the data are drawn from the available database of Australian test takers, but there are typically fewer cases spread out over a range of schools. Results are therefore not a comparison with a well understood population.
The comparison between a student's scale score achievement and the Australian reference group sample can be expressed as a percentile rank.
The percentile rank of a score is the percentage of students who achieve less than that score. For example, a student with a percentile rank of 75th compared to the Year 3 reference group has a scale score that is higher than 75% of Australian Year 3 students in the reference group.
Related article: What are the differences between norms and reference groups?