Reimagining early years assessment with storytelling and design

At ACER, the development of PAT Early Literacy – launching mid-2026 – demonstrates how research and user experience design can converge to create meaningful learning experiences for young students and deliver more reliable insights for educators.

Taking a new and imaginative approach, PAT Early Literacy invites children into a world of storytelling and adventure. Each of the three components – reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and phonics and phonological awareness – is framed as a quest, designed to spark curiosity and reduce anxiety for young students.

‘What excites me most is seeing how students respond to the newly developed Early Years theme,’ says Dr Dharshani Chandrasekara, User Experience Researcher. ‘Students guide characters on a quest throughout the assessment to solve a particular problem, which the characters get closer to solving as the student progresses.

This storytelling framework is the result of deep collaboration between ACER’s research and user experience teams.

‘Our team invested significant effort into exploring engaging and developmentally appropriate ways to design the assessment without compromising test validity,’ Dharshani explains.

Dr Sandra Knowles, Senior Assistant Director of Assessment Development, highlights the importance of balancing measurement with engagement. ‘That isn’t as challenging as you might think,’ she says. ‘We aim to develop a range of engaging and inclusive test materials. So long as the assessments measure the breadth and depth of the construct, they will serve as valid and reliable insights into students’ skill development.’

Designing assessments for young children comes with unique challenges, and not all conventional principles for adult learners apply. Students in the early years of school have a wide range of cognitive, motor, and comprehension abilities, which meant the team tailored each element to suit the developmental needs of younger users.

‘Another major consideration is attention span,’ adds Dharshani. ‘Young children can become disengaged or overwhelmed quickly, so we made deliberate choices to keep the experience engaging, intuitive and emotionally safe throughout the assessment process.’

While the experience was reimagined for young children, the assessment’s technical rigour remains uncompromised. ACER’s test development team ensured that the assessment captured the full range of student abilities and provided educators with reliable insights to guide their teaching.

‘The assessment design acknowledges that Early Literacy is made up of three key skill areas,’ explains Sandra. ‘The assessment is now separated into three separate parts so that teachers and educators can target what students most need at any particular time.’

‘If a teacher knows the child is tracking well in early phonics and phonological awareness skills, they can choose to focus on what the child understands through the listening comprehension assessment.’

The storytelling approach, she adds, is not just about aesthetics—it’s about creating a supportive environment for learning. ‘The test development team has worked closely with the user experience and design teams to ensure that the assessment is delivered in a way that keeps students engaged. It does this while also adopting a simplistic and repetitive approach to the actual tasks, so that students can demonstrate what skills they have attained without unnecessary complexity or interference.’

Importantly, the design also supports educators. ‘We created the assessment with educators in mind,’ Dharshani says. ‘I’m eager to see how the design features support teachers in managing their classrooms more effectively during test administration.”

With the addition of targeted teaching resources, teachers will be able to take immediate action based on assessment insights. ‘This gives the assessments much more diagnostic power,’ Sandra notes. ‘And the teaching resource materials will support teachers in guiding students to their next steps.’

To ensure the assessment is was both technically sound and engaging, ACER conducted a two-phase trial process. The first phase introduced the new early years theme and interface, allowing the team to gather feedback on usability and administration. The second phase focused on how well individual items (or questions) performed across a diverse range of learners, ensuring each item accurately measured the intended skills and that the full range of student abilities was being captured.

‘One memorable moment during usability testing was seeing the children’s excitement and engagement with the characters who guided them through each adventure,’ Dharshani recalls. ‘Seeing that these design elements sparked curiosity rather than anxiety reinforced the value of thoughtful, child-centred design and validated the effort we put into creating meaningful assessment experiences.’

PAT Early Literacy will be available to schools in the first half of 2026, and ACER is excited to share this new chapter in early years assessment: one where storytelling, design, and research come together to support every child to succeed in their learning.

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