After publishing my post about PATs areas that we test on without teaching, I recalled and decided to share a story about my last year Y4 student who scored Stanine 9 in PAT but struggled with one particular question - "Visualise which shape a net will fold to make."
At that time, I was placing an order to buy more maths resources for our school including a set of 3D folding shapes, which we used with our Year 3-4 classes. I wanted to provide our students with a hands-on way to explore and visualize 3D shapes and their nets. Little did I know that this tool would have a significant impact on their learning, even a year after using it. Surely, you can fold 3D shapes using paper, but we had an opportunity to purchase this maths equipment and students loved it!
Out of curiosity, I looked at random Y4 and Y5 classes to find out their answers to this particular PAT question for the past 3 years.
2020 - Term 4
2021 - Term 4
2022 - Term 1
2022 - Term 4 - our Team excelled in the PAT "visualise a shape" question that had previously stumped many of Year 4 and 5 students.
2023 Term 1 (after the summer break, mostly the same students with some new intakes)
"Visualize which shape a net will fold to make." This question could be challenging for some students because of a specific skill we often do not cover in our maths programme.
As seen from the examples above, after using the folding shapes in our team, students were able to visualize the 3D shapes and their nets with ease. They were able to apply their knowledge to the PAT assessment and, in Term 4 2022 for the first time in three years, most of Team Kea's students answered the question correctly. Furthermore, the majority of learners retained their knowledge after a summer break (this is not clean data as we have a number of new students from other schools and teams).
This set of data highlights the importance of analyzing assessment data to identify areas where our students need explicit teaching or additional support.
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