Q&A: Key PAT leaders on the evolution and impact of the assessment

Q: What do your roles involve in supporting PAT? 

Elliot Boutin: As School Support team leader, I look after the team which supports PAT users by phone and email. I've also helped coordinate new trials of PAT content. 

Daniel O’Loughlin: I'm the Project Director for the School Engagement team. So, I'm responsible for the team that runs a lot of our outbound engagement and support for schools, teachers and systems. Our team hosts these webinars, run the workshops, training sessions and face-to-face sessions.  
 

Q: How do you introduce PAT to educators who are new to it? 

Daniel: We want to establish a really clear foundation of PAT. So, we start with, ‘Why do we test?’, as well as key PAT metrics like scale scores, achievement bands and the norms. In unpacking this data or these metrics, we can then start linking it to the data and reports and interrogate to infer teaching and learning goals. 

We do really want to clearly unpack, why are schools doing PAT?  What is the clear purpose and how does that impact them as educators in terms of what they do next? Whether they will be engaging with the reports, whether they are implementing and administering, [it’s about] really getting them thinking about all the different things to support their learning community. 

Q: PAT has evolved significantly over the years. From your perspective, what have been the most notable changes and what has been the driving force behind those changes? 

Elliot: There's a lot to consider, but I guess what jumps out to me was the introduction of the PAT Reading Adaptive and PAT Maths Adaptive testing. I think it's true that no educator wants students to have a bad experience when they take a test, but the reality of assigning linear tests can be time intensive and you might not always get test selection right. So, I think adaptive has been a huge game changer when it comes to that aspect. 

It's introduced complexities as well, [with educators] working through all of the different questions that your students saw. Depending on the number of students you're looking at, this could mean hundreds of questions. So this can mean adapting how you've done things in the past. It may mean not looking at all the questions, Instead, it means going band by band and concentrating on students in a particular band that you're trying to reach and give some scaffolding to in the classroom.  

 Having such a huge amount of data to go through means it's even more important to get all teachers access to the system. It also means getting them trained up in how to use those tools and slice through the data so that they can use it for their planning and teaching.   

Q: What do you wish more educators knew about PAT and its potential? 

Daniel: There are so many amazing aspects of PAT that go under the radar. A key one is that PAT isn't just a ‘once per year look at the data’ type of test. I think there's so much that the data can help you with throughout your schooling year. There's so much available within the suite to support teachers. 

For example, if you're planning a unit of work, you can go back and quickly look at the questions that just touch that unit to give you some insight into how you plan. How did my students fare? What are some quick wins based on that data? Is it providing me some prior information before I even start the unit of work?  

Q: How does ACER incorporate feedback from schools? 

Elliot: The first thing I would say is that we feel privileged to take feedback. All feedback that we get gets seen and taken into consideration. One area where I see feedback from our users as really crucial is our stand-alone trials of new PAT content. At the end of those trials, we take pains to contact as many people who participated as possible to get feedback about the questions the kids saw. We also ask ‘Did everything go smoothly? What could we look at improving?’ And all this feedback goes directly to the test developers. 

Q: What does the future of PAT look like? What are you excited about? 

Daniel: I think the future is bright. I look forward to the PAT Early Literacy assessment as I've seen the initial development, and it looked incredible. It doesn't feel like a traditional assessment. Students won't even know they're kind of doing an assessment, it’ll feel more like an immersive and engaging story.  

I'm also really looking forward to the future developments within our reporting suite. There's lots to really look forward too.

Watch the webinar recording here.