PaCT PD

Wednesday 3 June

Yesterday we had teacher only day on the assessment tool PaCT centred around writing.  PaCT supports teachers to make overall judgements on their students.  The aspects or set you select for each area is placed on a graded continuum and PaCT requires you to make a best fit judgement.  Once you have completed your judgements the PaCT tool then puts this information onto a graph and aligns the final result with National Standards. 

I was already familiar with the basic workings of PaCT as last year we used PaCT to make overall judgements for our students in mathematics.  Hence, I knew how to select an aspect, confirm judgement, and view the results of individual students.  I was that impressed with the maths examples that I implemented some of the ideas into my maths programme last year and again this year.

By the end of the day I had completed my whole class judgements for writing using PaCT, so it took around 3 hours.  I really like how PaCT has a range of examples to help you make the best fit and I liked some of the planning ideas I saw in the PaCT examples.  I wish our writing sample rubric had examples to help make a best fit and that there was a definite set of different criteria for students to meet when moving up through the levels, instead of a slight difference.