Introduction
An Individual Report maps how well a student has performed on the different questions within a test. Although the Individual Reports for PAT:Mathematics, PAT:Reading Comprehension and PAT:Reading Vocabulary look quite different, they are all built on a set of common concepts.
Understanding the report
The Individual Report for PAT:Reading Comprehension displays the questions against the PAT:Reading Comprehension scale. The questions are grouped according to the texts they are associated with. Questions that the student answered correctly are circled and their level of achievement is shown by the dotted line which intersects the scale and the stanine score distributions for three different year levels.The highlighting around the dotted line is used to indicate the measurement 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.
Typically, a student is more likely to answer correctly 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.
The report provides a small amount of information about each text. This includes the text’s title, its word count, type and an indication of its difficulty (or readability) using the noun count method. It is important to consider the text when examining performance on the different questions. Students performance can be affected by their engagement in or knowledge of particular texts and text types.
Question types
The reports also colour codes the questions to indicate whether they involve retrieval, local inference or global inference
- Retrieval questions require the reader to comprehend without needing to infer; that is, the reader matches the wording of the question to wording in the text.
- Local inference questions require the reader to comprehend implied information from within relatively small sections of text.
- Global inference questions require the reader to comprehend implied information from across relatively larger sections of text.
The question types provide some idea of what reading skills the question involved. It might be that students who have problems with questions involving global inference for instance, require some help in this area. There are many reasons however why a student may have answered a particular question incorrectly and further investigation should occur before any definitive conclusions are reached.
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 find easy. Although it could also have been just a “silly mistake”, it should be followed up and investigated further. Similarly, when a student has correctly answered a question that was expected to be difficult 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. In the report shown below, the student has answered Questions 2 and 6 incorrectly (they are not circled with the black border). These questions were expected to be easy for this student as they are printed below the dashed line with a shaded background indicating that they are well below his level of achievement. It is possible that he has a gap in this area, which could be confirmed with further questioning.
The Individual Report for Comprehension
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