The Individual Report provides a student's position on the scale, aka the curriculum level and how well a student has performed on the different questions within a test. When viewing the individual report for PAT:Mathematics, users can view the graph displaying student responses across strands drill down into each individual question to gain insight from the answer the student chose. 

By CLICKING on the SHOW QUESTION button in the righthand menu, users can switch between List View & Strand View (see below).


The Individual Report displays the questions against the PAT:Mathematics scale (patm). The questions are grouped according to the Strand they are associated with. The questions are positioned because of  their location on the PAT:Mathematics scale, determined by the level of skill and knowledge required to answer them.  

The Report Key explains student responses:

  • Black circle - answered correctly
  • White circle - answered incorrectly
  • Grey circle - omitted

  • The student's scale position is shown by the dotted line which intersects the scale and the stanine score distributions for three different year levels on the left.
  • The blue highlighting around the dotted line is used to indicate the margin of error associated with the student’s score. If the test could be repeated, we would expect the student to score in the range indicated by the highlighting, about two thirds of the time. Students who achieve very highly or very poorly on a test will have a larger error associated with their score and it is less reliable. The student has clearly been given the wrong test.
  • Highly capable or struggling students should sit the test that matches their ability level or the PAT:Mathematics Adaptive test which quickly adapts to their ability level.

Typically, a student is more likely to correctly answer the questions listed below the line than above it. When a question is located well below the line there is a strong expectation that the question will be answered correctly. In contrast, it is very unlikely that a question located well above the line will be answered correctly. CLICK  on a question number to reveal the question and see the class responses.


Show Questions reveals a second page below containing question descriptions, organisation and ordering functions.        

  • Show List View :  order for scale difficulty of questions, order numerically, group questions that are related, order  question descriptions by verb
  • Show Strand View: questions organised in Strands, order for scale difficulty, order numerically, order question descriptions by verb


Each question can be displayed by clicking on a question number. This opens the Individual Item Report for that question, which displays the actual question as presented in the test and provides a range of information about the question, and displays the multi-choice options selected by students. It also provides links to similar questions in the test.



Gaps and strengths
Evidence that a gap exists in a student’s knowledge could be indicated when a student has incorrectly answered a question that he or she was expected to answer correctly.  Although it could also have been just a “silly mistake”, it should be followed up to reassure the teacher the student does understand fully.  


Similarly, when a student has correctly answered a question that was expected to be answered incorrectly it could be evidence that he or she has a particular strength in an area.  Again, there could also be other reasons; for instance, the student may have simply made a lucky guess.   

 

 NB:When students sit tests that are too easy, there are no questions at their scale level and teachers cannot define next steps.

        When students sit tests that are too hard, their responses are unreliable (guesses) and teaachers cannot define next steps.



Effective use of the Individual Report

The Individual report contains a wealth of information about each child. However, Kaiako workload prevents each teacher going to depth inside each student's individual report. Here are some suggestions for becoming efficient  managing a class list of individual reports:


Class-wide

  • From the List Report select a decade of the scale/aka specific area of the curriculum that needs prioritising. From the List of filtered students, begin opening their individual reports looking for patterns in their responses EG: Number knowledge strength but Number strategies at the same level of the scale are incorrect. OR obvious weakness in fractional/place value/strand* knowledge. You may not need to open all individual reports to find area of focus for next step planning


Individual students

NB: Be critical of each report - if the test was too easy or too hard the report may lead to invalid interpretation. In a  good report a student would answer 50% of the questions correctly (60% in adaptive) which gives confidence for what they know and next steps planning.

  • Target students who are:
    • On Learning Support (adaptive is the better choice)
    • Identified Target students
    • Stuedents who require extension (adaptive is the better choice)



 *It is important to note that each Strand has a different number of questions and that these questions vary in difficulty.  This makes it unwise to make direct comparisons between Strands on the basis of the number of questions answered correctly.  There is evidence that a student is performing less successfully in a Strand when he or she is unable to answer the majority of the questions in the Strand that are located below the student’s location on the scale.