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 genre-specific rubrics adapted specifically for the Aotearoa context.
As with all our assessments, the primary purpose of PAT Tuhituhi is to support teaching and learning. It is intended to be a formative, low-stakes assessment – one of several approaches schools should use to determine how ākonga are progressing, rather than a solitary indicator of progress.
This is a brand-new writing assessment from NZCER, and is currently in trial phase, with a release date later in 2025.
Features of PAT Tuhituhi:
- A standardised writing assessment, enabling schools to better measure ākonga progress in this critical aspect of their literacy
- Fully automated marking, saving kaiako significant amounts of time and minimising the potential for bias
- Content and design developed by NZCER with an equitable focus, ensuring all ākonga are reflected in the assessments
- 100% available online and easy to administer through our NZCER Assist platform
- Reflects a range of writing genres across the New Zealand Curriculum
- Includes relevant editing tools for ākonga
- Aligns to the English learning area of the new curriculum, and aspects of the NCEA co-requisite for literacy
What does PAT Tuhituhi assess?
PAT Tuhituhi assesses students’ ability to produce extended writing in a specific genre – selected by the teacher from persuasive, narrative, recount or informative writing. These genres map directly onto what available data suggests are the most prominent genres of writing taught in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The assessment evaluates how well students communicate ideas for a given audience and purpose, using appropriate structure, language, and writing conventions. Each genre is assessed using a tailored rubric covering focus, content development, organisation, language use, and mechanics.
Within each rubric, each of these categories is tailored further for each genre. For example, in the ‘content development and elaboration’ domain, the narrative writing rubric focuses on students’ ability to employ appropriate narrative techniques and vivid descriptive details, while this domain in the persuasive writing rubric focuses on students’ ability to provide specific evidence to support their claims.
Automated marking for PAT Tuhituhi
NZCER has collaborated with Vantage, an organisation that provides educational measurement software, to develop the automated marking system that is a part of PAT Tuhituhi.
Vantage provided NZCER with a set of rubrics for marking writing samples, and with a library of prompts that these rubrics had been trained on. In turn, NZCER worked with local experts to review and update these prompts and rubrics to suit the Aotearoa context, with a strong equity focus. NZCER has also conducted significant work to train the scoring models on New Zealand data.
When a piece of writing is submitted by ākonga, it is automatically marked by the Vantage system, with results delivered through NZCER Assist. All automated marking is also reviewed by NZCER’s assessment experts.
How to access PAT Tuhituhi
PAT Tuhituhi is an online-only assessment, available through our NZCER Assist platform on a subscription basis. It will be made available to schools later in 2025.
Schools must sign up and log in to NZCER Assist to access PAT Tuhituhi in the same way they would our other PATs. If you have not used NZCER Assist before, you can begin by contacting our Assessment Services team and they will help you get set up.
Schools subscribe on NZCER Assist then choose their subjects, then can purchase individual assessments for each ākonga.
NZCER Assist also gives schools access to our comprehensive diagnostic reporting and ongoing support from our Assessment Services team.