Tēnā koe, and welcome to the first edition of our PAT mailbag! We received some great pātai to start us off with—and we’ll add everything new that comes through to our Understanding PATs page as well.
As for your helpful assessment experts answering pātai today, we have:
- Elliot Lawes (EL), Mātanga Tātari Tatauranga | Psychometrician
- Julie Roberts (JR), Kaitohu Mātauranga | Education Advisor
- Melissa Denzler (MD), Kaitohu Mātauranga | Education Advisor
Now for your questions!
We currently do PAT Maths at the beginning of term 2, and the beginning of term 4, 6 months of learning at school. The scale scores talk about expected progress for a year e.g., year 5&6 students in one year are expected to make 6.1.
Should we be doing PAT Maths at the beginning of term 1 and near the end of term 4 to use this measuring more effectively?
The scale score changes given for a ‘year’ are from Term 1 in one year to Term 1 in the next year. In general, we can expect that to be very similar to the progress made between Term 1 and Term 4, as students don’t generally do a lot of mathematics learning over the school holidays.
If you want a sense of the progress made over a year, then ideally the second test should be done as close to the end of the school year as your schedule allows.
When thinking about progress it’s important to consider whether you are interested in progress for individual students or for a group of students. Progress measures for individual students are less precise than for a group. A reliable picture of progress for a student will emerge over a period of several assessments rather than between two assessments. [EL]
Why do scale scores alter. I looked last week at a class and this week, they are different scores?
Scale scores for an individual shouldn’t alter unless there has been an update to someone’s score or NZCER has carried out a recalibration. The changes you saw may be due to the volume of information going through NZCER Assist. With as many as 15,000 students sitting PATs on any given day, results are queued and processed over a period of time. Scores will update as the information is received. We encourage schools to look at reports the day after PATs are administered – immediate information may still be processing!
Are you able to provide samples of each of the PATS assessments, please? It would be helpful to learn more about what schools will be using in 2025.
Āe - we have some sample questions for PAT Pāngarau available here, and you can also access those in NZCER Assist if you have an account.
We do have to keep the majority of PAT questions close to our chest though – having them all publicly available can jeopardise the integrity of the assessments! [MD]
My school invested heavily in the new (updated) PAT Mathematics resources at the beginning of this year. With the curriculum refresh coming in next year, I'm just wondering if these assessments will still be current?
Yes, your assessments will still be current—you will still be able to use the assessments to generate scale scores, compare student progress with national norms, and to look at how students have responded to individual questions.
Over time, you will also see new online reports added to the NZCER Assist platform that will provide information about what the scores achieved by your students mean against the phases of the new curriculum.
We are confident that the content of PAT Pāngarau | mathematics is aligned with the new curriculum. That said, over time new content will be added to the bank of items that drives the adaptive tests to ensure the alignment is optimised.
In short—yes they will still be current! [JR]
Is PAT Reading Comprehension no longer available as an online test?
PAT Reading Comprehension has been refreshed, and the new edition is now called PAT Pānui. The old edition of PAT Reading will not be supported online from 2025. It is expected that schools will transition across to using the new edition, PAT Pānui, which is available both online and as a paper test. [JR]
That's all for this round - but if you have a burning question you'd like answered about PATs, let us know here!