Schools should clearly plan their use of PAT Early Literacy assessments. For monitoring progress, a 9–12 month gap between tests is recommended, with growth best measured over at least two years or three sessions. Phonics skill growth can be rapid, so teachers should use professional judgement on test selection and frequency.
Related article: Choosing the right PAT Early Literacy test
Planning
As a school, you should be clear on your purpose for using PAT assessments and carefully plan your assessment approach, especially when monitoring student learning progress over time.
Most schools administer their PAT 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 PAT at the beginning of the year, placing a greater emphasis on teachers acting on the diagnostic information. Others use PAT both at the beginning and end of the year in order to maximise the diagnostic information available to monitor growth throughout the year.
Monitoring progress
For the purpose of monitoring student progress, a gap of 9 to 12 months between testing sessions for both Listening Comprehension and Reading Comprehension is recommended. Learning progress may not be reflected in a student’s 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. For Listening Comprehension, the Listening scale is specific to the PAT Early Literacy Listening Comprehension assessments. For Reading Comprehension, growth measurement can continue as students move on to PAT Reading 5th Edition and/or PAT Reading Adaptive.
Growth in phonics and related skills can be swift amongst young learners and is commonly tied to what is explicitly taught in the classroom. It may not be necessary to assess all students at each test level within the first two years of school. Teachers should review the content of each Phonics and Related Skills test form and use professional judgement when deciding which students to assess, with which test form, and how frequently. The tests increase in difficulty, with Test 1 being the easiest.