NZCER is excited to announce that PAT Tuhituhi, the newest addition to our Progressive Achievement Tests (PATs), is now live for schools to use.
PAT Tuhituhi is an online, standardised writing assessment for ākonga from Year 5 to Year 10. It aligns to the English learning area of the New Zealand Curriculum, as well as to aspects of the NCEA co-requisite in literacy. Students submit written responses through our NZCER Assist platform, and automated marking provides teachers with immediate scoring and feedback. This draws on a set of rubrics adapted specifically for the Aotearoa context.
We completed a trial in Term 1, collecting and marking more than 14,000 assessments, whilst developing new reporting formats on our NZCER Assist platform. PAT Tuhituhi is now available for schools to use in Term 3.
Background: Our PATs (and the importance of formative assessment)
PATs have been developed, administrated and offered by NZCER for more than 50 years now, and will continue to be in 2026 and beyond.
Over this time, their purpose has remained consistent: to offer to kaiako and kura a standardised tool for low-stakes, formative assessment that supports teaching and learning in Years 3-10.
They are not designed to be used as high-stakes, summative assessments that could be put in the service of streaming students, ranking teachers, determining school funding or any other such measure.
We’ve maintained a focus on PATs as formative assessment tools because we know that low-stakes formative assessment can significantly support student learning (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Lee et al., 2020; Ruiz-Primo & Brookhart, 2017).
There are two main reasons for this:
- First, the information that comes out of formative assessment can help teachers to tailor their teaching to the needs of their students.
- Second, this information supports students to understand and act on their strengths and areas for potential development (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Sadler, 1989).
Although it is useful for teachers to embrace a wide variety of formative assessment tools, the use of a centrally-produced, standardised formative assessment tool can be particularly beneficial. Like other PATs, PAT Tuhituhi has been locally designed, includes have tasks which have been thoroughly assessed for biases or the potential to exacerbate inequality, has been carefully designed to ensure alignment with the curriculum, and has undergone rigorous testing with large groups of students in Aotearoa. NZCER carries a deep knowledge of the educational context in Aotearoa New Zealand. This ensures that the assessments are carefully developed to be relevant, accessible, and meaningful for teachers and students in this country.
Why we have developed PAT Tuhituhi
We know many schools and teachers strongly value NZCER’s current PAT offerings, but there has been a long-standing gap in our writing assessment offerings. The development of PAT Tuhituhi intends to fill this gap and comes at an opportune time for schools for the reasons below.
The New Zealand Government has announced that from 2026, all schools will undertake biannual progression monitoring in the domains of reading, writing and mathematics for students in Years 3-8 (with a desire that schools begin doing this earlier if possible). This is part of a broader government plan for more consistency in our literacy & numeracy teaching, assessment, and reporting on achievement. While PATs are available for two of these subjects, there is not currently one for writing.
Teachers report they are increasingly time poor (Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, 2023) and can often struggle to find time to collect meaningful formative assessment data (Wylie & MacDonald, 2020). We aim to address this struggle by introducing a well-designed, easy to use PAT that offers immediate feedback for teachers and students.
A revised New Zealand Curriculum is in the process of being developed and released. In the Y0-6 component of the English learning area there is a renewed focus on writing, which sits alongside reading and oral language to make up the three core ‘strands’ around which this learning area is organised. While we have PATs covering at least some components of these other areas (i.e. our reading comprehension, reading vocabulary, and listening comprehension PATs), again, writing is absent.
NCEA now includes a literacy co-requisite, for which a standardised ‘common assessment activity’ (CAA) is administered for writing, alongside one for reading comprehension. This has led to an increased focus on writing – particularly in secondary schools, but also in primary schools. There is therefore great benefit in having a standardised formative assessment that teachers & students can make use of before students sit the writing CAA, in order to support students’ development in writing.
We will share more information on this wonderful new writing assessment throughout the term. In the meantime, if you would like to be among the first to receive updates on this, you can sign up for our monthly pānui or termly Assessment News here.