PAT Vocabulary Skills is a set of online spelling assessments that allow you to identify the extent of students’ English vocabulary knowledge and skills, to diagnose gaps, identify strengths and weaknesses, and to monitor student progress over time.
The following topics are covered in this article:
The following articles provide more detailed information about using PAT Vocabulary Skills effectively:
- When to test with PAT Vocabulary Skills
- Choosing the right PAT Vocabulary Skills test
- Administering PAT Vocabulary Skills tests
- Using results from PAT Vocabulary Skills
Introduction
PAT Vocabulary Skills (2019), comprises five test forms recommended for students in Years 2 to 10. It is offered alongside PAT Vocabulary (2007).
PAT Vocabulary Skills assesses a broader range of vocabulary skills. The construct expands the kinds of processes that are likely to support students’ improved vocabulary beyond the identification of synonyms.
PAT Vocabulary comprises five test forms recommended for students in Years 3 to 10. PAT Vocabulary assesses word knowledge through identification of synonyms.
Results cannot be directly compared between PAT Vocabulary Skills and PAT Vocabulary assessments.
Related article: PAT Vocabulary
About PAT Vocabulary Skills
For more detailed information about the assessment, refer to the PAT Vocabulary Skills Assessment Framework.
Vocabulary is central to comprehension and learning with understanding. Students with limited vocabularies will inevitably have limited comprehension skills and consequently little understanding of what they are learning. All students need to be continually expanding and enriching their vocabularies as they move through school in order to meet the increasingly complex intellectual demands of higher year levels. Teachers at all year levels need to identify the extent of students’ vocabularies in order to support them to improve.
PAT Vocabulary Skills is based on research evidence about the importance of a vocabulary that is both broad and rich in interconnections between known words. Also important is an understanding of the contexts in which words are used and how words might be associated, and of how roots and affixes can influence the meaning of words. PAT Vocabulary Skills was developed in recognition of the critical importance of vocabulary skills to student learning and progress.
The PAT Vocabulary Skills construct is the organising principle of the assessment; it is used to guide test development and structure the PAT reports. This structure is also part of the Progressive Achievement approach because the knowledge, skills and understanding represented in the assessments is designed to support educators in identifying student needs.
There are four process strands in PAT Vocabulary Skills that describe some key ways that students know and understand vocabulary:
- Knowing – knowledge of meaning and definitions
- Applying – identifying synonyms and inferring meaning from context
- Categorising – sorting words into conceptual categories and ordering words within a category by degree
- Morphology – understanding and use of morphemes
At lower levels of the progression, students know fewer words and their knowledge of the meaning of those words is frequently superficial. As students progress, the number of words they know expands and the depth of their knowledge about those words increases.