PAT

What is the PAT test?

Reading teachers are busy giving students the PAT test in their room this week! What is the PAT test? PAT stands for Phonological Awareness Test (not to be confused with Physical Abilities Test for potential law enforcement or Playing Ability Test used to measure golf ability.)  This test focuses on assessing students awareness of the oral language segments that comprise words.  The test is broken down into the following structures. 

• Rhyming: Discrimination and Production—Identify rhyming pairs and provide a rhyming word.
• Segmentation: Sentences, Syllables, and Phonemes—Divide by words, syllables and phonemes.
• Isolation: Initial, Final, Medial—Identify sound position in words.
• Deletion: Compound Words, Syllables, and Phonemes—Manipulate root words, syllables, and phonemes in words.
• Substitution With Manipulatives—Isolate a phoneme in a word, then change it to another phoneme to form a new word.
• Blending: Syllables and Phonemes—Blend units of sound together to form words.
• Graphemes—Assess knowledge of sound/symbol correspondence for consonants, vowels, consonant blends, consonant digraphs, r-controlled vowels, vowel digraphs, and diphthongs.
• Decoding—Assess general knowledge of sound/symbol correspondence to blend sounds into nonsense words.

The test results help us focus on aspects of a child's oral language that may not be specifically targeted in the general ed classroom. The test takes about 30-40 minutes to administer and is updated three times a year. When scored, the test breaks down each component relevant to the child's age and is then normed. This assessment helps us identify the greatest phonological awareness need, group students and choose the best word work instruction. Interested in the results? Feel free to ask for a copy. 

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