Julie Roberts and Cathie Johnson are NZCER's Education Advisors, who meet with schools every day to support them with their assessment and PLD needs. You can read more about what they do here.
Phew, where did that time go? We have visited so many schools this term, and are so grateful for all of your input and feedback on PAT Tuhituhi | PAT Writing so far. As our newest assessment, we are continuing to develop tweaks and updates that will make things easier for you. We’ve heard a lot of questions from kaiako and tumuaki this term, and want to take a minute to hopefully clarify some important points that will support your reporting to parents and whānau when you head back to the classroom in Term 2.
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PAT Tuhituhi and SMART Tool rubrics
This is a fairly hot-off-the-press item – the similarities between the rubrics for PAT Tuhituhi and the rubrics for Ministry of Education’s SMART writing tool.
The writing rubric used in PAT Tuhituhi was originally adapted by NZCER for the Aotearoa context, building on earlier work from Vantage Learning. We honed our rubric and automated scoring system with an extensive trial, involving more than 14,000 pieces of writing from Aotearoa students alongside a carefully designed and implemented marking programme.
NZCER has supported the Ministry to adapt this rubric for use in the SMART writing tool. Having similar rubrics across both assessments reflects a common understanding of key aspects of writing development and helps ensure consistency in how student writing is described and interpreted, no matter what tool a school uses.
While the rubric has a shared origin, the assessments themselves have been developed independently. PAT Tuhituhi and SMART have different design, writing tasks, administration, scoring models, and reporting. With PAT Tuhituhi, schools get:
- Immediate auto-scoring and reporting through our NZCER Assist platform
- 12 auto-scoring models (one for each writing task) that have been trained on Aotearoa student writing
- Content and tasks adapted by NZCER
- Relevant editing tools for ākonga
- Reporting that shows strengths and areas of improvement at both individual and class level (with new features coming in Term 2)
- National norms based on existing PAT Tuhituhi data – these will be updated in Term 2 to incorporate the most recent use of the tool in Term 1, and will be retroactively applied to completed Tuhituhi assessments.
PAT Tuhituhi currently supports assessment for students in Years 5–10. NZCER is developing a new assessment for Years 3–4, which will include a purpose-built rubric designed to better capture the aspects of writing most relevant at this stage of development.
Using a common rubric supports clearer understanding of student progress, while each tool provides its own approach to gathering and using information about student writing.
PAT Tuhituhi is a snapshot assessment
When interpreting reports for PAT Tuhituhi, we’d like to remind you that this is a snapshot assessment, focused on how well a student composes a text online in a specific genre of writing. While PAT Tuhituhi targets many of the key ideas in the curriculum, results should be interpreted as evidence of performance on this assessment rather than a comprehensive measure of a student’s writing across the full curriculum.
Additional reporting is on the way!
We also have more types of PAT Tuhituhi reports on the way. This will include:
- Year group and collated class reports (the equivalent of an item report, showing how ākonga collectively responded to particular tasks or genres).
- Schoolwide reporting including ethnicity, scale level and gender filters
- Whānau reports, including where a student’s piece of writing sits within the new progress descriptors.
Updated norms for Term 2
Next term, we will also have updated national reference information (norms). So far, PAT Tuhituhi norms have been based on trial data – a necessity for any new assessment. But with so many of you taking part in PAT Tuhituhi this term, we have enough information to update these norms and provide a more reliable set of national reference information. This will be retrospectively applied to all assessments – so any PAT Tuhituhi tests that your students have sat will be scored and scaled alongside this more reliable data.
Interpreting PAT Tuhituhi results: Annotated examples
Some of the most frequent conversations we have been having are around interpreting PAT Tuhituhi reports. We understand how important this is, and hope to make things as straightforward as we can while retaining the robust, reliable assessment information you expect from us.
When viewing these results, consider what your classroom writing programme has focused on and how you see evidence of this in your students' independent writing.
Below, you will find some annotated reports for PAT Tuhituhi – one class rubric, and one individual student report. We also have seven scoring exemplars on the PAT Tuhituhi page here, which break down how the assessment rubric is applied to a student’s piece of writing.
- Scale score: This reflects the student’s point-in-time assessment, and should be used to measure progress over time and support teaching and learning (i.e. not summatively)
- Interim Year Level Benchmarks: Students can be at the national median, or above / below the 25th and 75th percentile for their year group
- Rubric scores: These reflect a student’s progress in each element across the Year 5-10 curriculum
- AI generated comment: Specific reporting of the writing, designed to support kaiako undersranding of the writing process.
- Student’s editing: Green - ākonga writing; Pink - ākonga deletions; no highlight - ākonga additions.
- Response status: Flags if a student did not click “Finish”
- Autoscoring review status: To check if students made errors requiring review
- Genre rubric: Describes the five elements for the process of writing with six stages of development for each across Year 5-10 achievement.
- Actions: Click here to manually mark student scripts
- Marker: Confirms a piece of writing was autoscored or manually scored
Tips and tricks for analysing PAT Tuhituhi reports
When you are analysing a list report, we recommend printing out the rubric and having it alongside you. Order the scale score column in the list report, and select a learning level stage to focus on.
From there, you can review scores across the elements of writing to identify students' strengths and areas for improvement. Moving between the rubric and the curriculum statements will help you to identify what students have mastered, and what their next steps might be.
We also encourage kaiako to familiarise themselves with the rubric by taking 2-3 pieces of student writing, and considering the following as they compare those with the rubric.
- What are each student’s strengths?
- What are each student’s next steps?
- Does this writing align with what you notice in other online or handwritten pieces of text?
At an individual student level, review the work students have done at the planning, writing and editing stages. Consider their strengths and areas for growth at each stage of the writing process. For example, a student may have done lots of planning but very little writing.
And then, when looking at the whole class through the list report, the following:
- Is there an element that needs more attention or explicit teaching in your programme?
- Are there some students that need some small group explicit teaching on some elements?
As always, we welcome your feedback. We want PAT Tuhituhi to be as useful as possible for your teaching and learning, and your input is essential for this.
Ngā manaakitanga,
Julie Roberts and Cathie Johnson
Education Advisors