This article includes the following commonly asked questions:
- What is the PAT Teaching Resources Centre?
- How do I use the PAT Teaching Resources Centre?
- How can I find teaching activities, annotated questions and videos?
- How can PAT assessment results be used?
What is the PAT Teaching Resources Centre?
The PAT Teaching Resources Centre is an online repository of F–10 teaching materials directly linked to PAT student assessment data, supporting students’ individual learning progress with thousands of evidence-based teaching activities and annotated questions.
Part of the flagship PAT suite, the Teaching Resources Centre provides materials linked to all national and state curricula for a growing selection of domains, including Reading, Maths, Science, STEM Contexts, Vocabulary Skills, Spelling Skills and Critical Reasoning. ACER’s Progressive Achievement approach involves 3 key steps to progress student learning: using student assessment data to diagnose starting points, supporting students’ next steps with the PAT Teaching Resources Centre, and then monitoring growth of student achievement over time. In this way, all learners can be supported to demonstrate meaningful progress, regardless of where they began their journey.
Teaching activities provide targeted resources differentiated to meet the needs of students below, at and beyond their current level of achievement. Learning intentions are clearly articulated at the beginning of all teaching activities, which use a variety of instructional strategies to convey information, facilitate understanding and promote active learning. The activities include discussion starting points, individual and group work, hands-on mini activities and games, and a range of multimedia resources. Sequenced and scaffolded, the activities are organised in a logical and progressive manner along the PAT difficulty scale, with clearly signposted differentiation that further empowers teachers to target the learning needs of every student.
Annotated questions provide detailed information about each of the PAT assessment items that have been attempted by students. These annotations deconstruct the question; identify required key concepts, common errors and misconceptions; and explain the steps students may have followed in selecting their responses.
The PAT Teaching Resources Centre also provides further materials such as free remote learning activities, Thinking Mathematically teaching activities, Reading Text Complexity examples, Spelling Error Diagnosis as well as skills and professional support videos for teachers.
The PAT Teaching Resources Centre not only empowers teachers to use PAT assessment data to meaningfully inform targeted teaching and improve student learning, but also supports students to take the next steps in their learning journey.
How do I use the PAT Teaching Resources Centre?
The following steps describe one method of using the PAT Teaching Resources Centre to plan effective programs of work for your students.
- Assess your students with an appropriate PAT assessment.
- Review student and class PAT assessment results in the PAT reporting platform.
- Using the Achievement Report (in the PAT Data Explorer) or the Bands Report (in the PAT linear reports), identify the students in a particular achievement band that need support in mastering a specific skill.
- Locate the corresponding teaching activities in the PAT Teaching Resources Centre that are directly related to the skill requiring support.
- Select an appropriate activity within that achievement band and assign it to the relevant students.
Example
- Class 5B completes PAT Reading 5th Edition Test 5.
- You analyse the results on the PAT reporting platform to look for strengths and weaknesses in the class, within groups of students and in individuals, for the different skill areas and particular questions.
- Using results displayed in the Achievement Report (in the PAT Data Explorer) or the Bands Report (in the PAT linear reports), you divide the students into three groups with the following scale scores: 110–119; 120–129; 130–139.
- For the first group, you select band 110–119 in the PAT Teaching Resources Centre, and then you select the Interpreting implied information strand.
- After reviewing the relevant resources in the PAT Teaching Resources Centre, you select Summarising 1 as the first teaching activity to work on with this group of students.
How can I find teaching activities, annotated questions and videos?
Take a look at the PAT Teaching Resources Centre quick-start guide to discover key features and navigation tips to help you get started.
You can navigate by learning area and resource type from the homepage to browse the topics within each year level or band. Alternatively, you can search by Australian, Victorian and New South Wales curriculum codes. You can access information and resources about achievement bands, sub-strands and skills by selecting the flyout menus within a band.
Each PAT learning area is divided into a range of sub-strands or processes. Progression within each learning area is described through achievement bands, grouped by scale scores. The different learning areas each have different scales.
How can PAT assessment results be used?
Results can be used at both group and individual levels.
- PAT scale scores can be used to measure improvement in student learning over time.
- Percentile ranks and stanines will provide a picture of how students' results compare with results of students in the norm reference sample in the same year level across Australia.
- Analysis of students' performance across curriculum content strands will provide information to inform teaching practice.
More detailed information on interpreting PAT assessment results can be found in the Help Centre, the PAT Essentials Kit, and through PAT Professional Learning courses.