What should I know about making PaCT judgments?

Make your aspect judgments based on what you already know about your students.
Use the things you notice about what students know and can do in your teaching and learning programme as a primary source of information for making judgments on an aspect. This includes both oral and written responses to various tasks.

It is important that you are confident about what it is that the student can do independently and most of the time. A large collection of evidence is not necessary for this purpose, although you should be able to justify your decision by using your knowledge of the student, supported by evidence from classroom tasks or any formal assessments if needed.

You can make aspect judgments quickly because you know your programme and your students.
Making an aspect judgment for all the students in your class is quick, especially once you’re familiar with the content of the sets. It is also likely to be more efficient if you make judgments for aspects that have been recently covered in your teaching and learning programme. The process looks like this:

Making an aspect judgment is a best-fit decision.
It is important to remember that PaCT requires you to make best-fit decisions. Rather than looking for a perfect match between a student and a set of illustrations, you are looking for the set which is the closest or best fit for what the student knows and can do when they respond to similar sorts of tasks. The sets were deliberately developed to be distinct and well spread, so making the best-fit decision should be straightforward.

Confirm your aspect judgments when you need to report and review progress.
When you have made judgments for all the aspects in reading, writing, or mathematics for a student, PaCT can then generate an overall judgment for that student. The overall judgment combines the aspect judgments in a score range on the PaCT scale which is aligned to curriculum levels.

Remember that the overall judgment is based on your own judgments, so if you are surprised by the overall judgment generated by PaCT, you should review your aspect judgments. The tool provides an opportunity for you to add explanatory comments for those students who may have an unusual aspect profile or whose rate of progress does not follow a typical trajectory.

Generating an overall judgment twice a year is appropriate as it provides sufficient opportunity for progress to be made.

The aim of moderation when using PaCT is to arrive at a shared understanding of how to use the appropriate framework to make judgments. 
Effective moderation discussions focus on ensuring teachers develop a shared understanding of what to notice and recognise, and that judgments are being made in a similar way. Moderation discussions provide an opportunity for teachers to discuss how to interpret the illustrations, and explain how they have reached decisions about different students and what evidence they have brought to bear. In general, moderation when using PaCT will not involve groups of teachers formally examining examples of students’ work.

Confirm judgments for all students so that you can track individuals' progress over time.
Reading, writing, and mathematics are important as they are the foundation for learning at and beyond school. PaCT provides a comprehensive and straightforward way to monitor the progress of all students in these foundation areas. To get this comprehensive picture of the achievement and progress of individual students, you need to make judgments for all students in your class.