As a school, you should be clear on your purpose for using PAIS assessments and carefully plan your assessment approach, especially when monitoring of student learning progress over time.
Most schools administer their 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.
Some schools choose to use PAIS at the beginning of the year, placing a greater emphasis on teachers acting on the diagnostic information. Others use PAIS both at the beginning and end of the year in order to maximise the diagnostic information available to monitor growth throughout the year.
PAIS Adaptive allows you to gather richer diagnostic information about what each student can do in a particular learning area and 'parallel' testlets minimise the chance of students being repeatedly exposed to the same content. For this reason, the PAIS Adaptive may be administered at times between those longitudinal measurement points. Scale scores from these interim sittings would not necessarily be considered when monitoring progress over a matter of years.
Monitoring progress
For the purpose of monitoring student progress, a gap of 9 to 12 months between testing sessions is recommended. Learning progress may not be reflected in a student's PAIS 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.