[dharder]

Are there any teachers or parents here who can explain the PAT thingy to me? I understand it sort of checks where the child is in relation to his/her peers nationally. I have tried looking this up on the Internet, but normally, all I get are the results of some invidual schools on their websites, or a service offering electronic marking of the test.

One thing I would really like to find out is what do the tests look like? (not the maths one, the reading/listening ones). Is there a site somewhere were I could look this up?

The other bit is what are the expectations of the children, what is ‘normal’ within any given context/school? If a child has a 5 in some test, that would make him/her average, but if everyone else in his school had a 7 in the same test, that would make him/her weaker than the other students. Will schools here give you a context in which to put this for the individual school? Is this data that is normally collated?

Do parents use this information, do the teachers use it? How much in importance does this rank compared to the SATs, for example?

Thanks for any help with this, greatly appreciated.

Daniela

[Tia Maria]

I probably know as much as you do, it seems to be a relatively new thing for our school and they are going to be holding an information evening and have also been asking for feedback from parents.

PAT stands for Progress and Achievement results. They should show you how your child is performing compared to National Norms, where the mean average is 5. And how well your child is performing compared to their Year Group, (the school year average will vary and should be stated).

The idea is that show your child's strengths and learning gaps. I suspect they become more important for the older children. I know that our Year 6 Reading comprehension mean score was 7.2, compared to the national average of 5. So it will be one way of checking out a school's performance.

I'm not sure if the info night at our school next term, is just for year 3-6 children, but if not I'll let you know what I find out!

Cheers

Tia

[dharder]

I know that our Year 6 Reading comprehension mean score was 7.2, compared to the national average of 5.

Thanks Tia, that is exactly the kind of information I would like about our school as well in order to put this into context. I will see if ours has that, too.

Our school in England, for example, always performed below national average, so it was pretty easy to be top dog academically there even if on a larger scale, you might actually not have been very good. Which kind of meant for us that we were always 'pushy mums' when we pointed out that there was room for improvement, since the boys were doing better than average in their school.

I would like to know here what is the average for the school to find out at which point they would consider a child to need special attention in one area or the other.

Thanks Tia,

Daniela

[Sam B]

They clearly aren't built up as much as SATs because my daughter didn't seem to notice she'd done them, and I didn't know she had until her teacher mentioned them. I just asked my daughter what they involved, so I could tell you, but she couldn't remember them. Her teacher explained them to me, both how she had performed in relation to the national average and her class, but I had to go in and request this.

[dharder]

They clearly aren't built up as much as SATs because my daughter didn't seem to notice she'd done them, and I didn't know she had until her teacher mentioned them.

So it varies quite a bit from school to school then. The children in the boys' school did know about them, did a practice run, I think. There was a parents' evening telling us that we would get the results sent home, which we did yesterday. But yes, they clearly are not like the SATs in importance, though I have read a few schools' webpages that kind of made it sound as if they used them somewhat similarly.

I'll see if I can talk to the teachers after the holidays then, to get a better idea. And not that anyone should think I'm always like this (well, okay, I am a little bit), but the boys have done 3 different schools in three different countries with two different languages within the last 10 months, so I am just trying to keep an eye on where they are at and should be in the middle of all that confusion...

Thanks for your input :)

Daniela

[marcia]

We were shown the results of the boys PAT tests, which were toatly new to me too - I knew the whole thing inside out in the uk P levels then stages etc for the SATS.

The thing I liked about the printed sheet they showed us was it highlighted answers that they would expect a child of a certain age to answer easily, and showed if there was a particular weakness in a given area, so they teacher can do more work with the child in that particular area. One of ours in the comprehension section scored surprisingly lower than all his other 'English' lvls, we looked at the paper he had done and i could understand why he'd got a couple of questions wrong because he didn't understand some of the Maori words used in the sentence - eg Marai - but what we have also done is bought him a pocket dictionary, and we're encorgaing him to look a word up if he reads or hears one he doesn't understand, and we keep getting 'what does that mean' all the time now, so we send him off for his dictionary.
Its highlighted an area that needs work and now we can build on that.

But I too, must find out more about how they compare the levels, to gain a better understanding of it, and i also need to look into what they do at high school, as regards what we had in 'my days' which were 'o' levels, 16+ and CSE's (god I'm old! :D ):clap

[Carol]

They are also years old!!! (ie not renewed/changed/altered in the last .....12 + years that I know of!)
I found them a total waste of my time (especially the marking of them!) - and told me nothing I didn't already know.....

(With the possible exception of the listening comprehension..... which always throws up some surprising positive results compared to the reading one.... different skills - same intelligence - different results..... type of scenario)