Your 2024 favourites: the most popular PAT teaching resources
Feature less than 1 day ago 7 minute readIn 2024, educators made great use of the PAT Teaching Resource Centre. Which tools did they use the most? We share them with you in this round up.
The PAT Teaching Resources Centre supports educators to link assessment data to their teaching practice, an integral part of ACER’s Progressive Achievement approach. A rich resource hub, the centre offers teaching activities, annotated questions, videos, text complexity examples and error diagnosis guides, with most of the resources mapped to versions 8.4 and 9.0 of the Australian Curriculum.
We’ve profiled the most-accessed tools from the PAT Teaching Resource Centre.
Most popular Reading teaching activity: Scanning a narrative
Locating relevant information in a text is an important skill for readers at all levels. The Reading teaching activity Scanning a narrative helps build students’ understanding of how to identify relevant information in a text.
Using a short, engaging narrative text based on stories from The Jungle Book, this activity begins with the whole group and then leads into small group or individual work. The teacher demonstrates the skill of scanning a text to locate significant words or phrases and then reading around that part of the text to locate specific information. Students must then locate other specific information on their own using the same strategies. The activity also helps students to identify phrases that, while appearing to be useful, actually do not provide the necessary information, or provide only partial information. These are important skills for students both in school-based reading activities and in broader life, where locating relevant information (such as in an overview of a medicine’s effects, a technical instruction manual or an advertisement for an event) is a necessary everyday skill.
Most popular Maths teaching activity: Addition and subtraction of multi-digit numbers
One of the earliest skills that children learn once they have an understanding of ‘number’ is to add and subtract whole numbers. It is a skill that is used throughout life in many contexts.
The most popular Maths teaching activity of 2024, Addition and subtraction of multi-digit numbers, focuses on this skill when it is applied to large numbers. The teaching activity itself consists of 2 tasks: a real-world newspaper search that can done online and is useful for practicing problem-solving skills, and a customisable puzzle, adaptable to different student abilities.
Addition and subtraction calculations involving numbers greater than 99 can require combining previously learned skills, such as calculating with numbers less than 99, renaming and partitioning numbers, and vertical addition and subtraction. Good number sense is also required. In the Australian Curriculum (Version 9.0), explicit reference is made to adding and subtracting two- and three-digit numbers at year 4 (AC9M3N03) and numbers of any size in later year levels.
PAT Maths assessment questions that may require knowledge of the skills covered in this teaching activity can be found in bands 109 and above.
Most popular video: How to improve reading comprehension – Video 1
Featuring ACER’s Principal Research Fellow Prue Anderson, our professional support videos identify some of the key evidence-based ideas that help students improve their capacity to understand the texts that they are reading.
Video 1 introduces the series of short videos, outlines what they cover, and identifies further research that you may wish to undertake yourself in future.
Honourable mentions
Publisher’s choice for Critical Reasoning teaching activity: Keeping animals in zoos: arguments for and against
Among the most important critical thinking skills is the ability to acknowledge the emotions that underlie any debate, including one’s own emotions, and to consider and evaluate the reasons that can be offered to support different viewpoints. Developing such skills equips students for life in a world of competing factual and ethical claims.
In the Critical Reasoning teaching activity, Keeping animals in zoos: arguments for and against, students are invited to focus on the ethics of keeping animals in zoos. They start by considering their own immediate responses to images of captive and free animals. Then, using a simple graphic organiser, they brainstorm arguments for and against zoos, both individually and in groups. They work together to identify arguments on both sides of the issue and to explore the scope and quality of these arguments.
Publisher’s choice for Science teaching activity: Classifying dangerous animals
Classifying is an important, fundamental skill for all students to learn particularly in sciences such as chemistry, geology and biology. Year 7 biology has a specific focus on classification of flora and fauna that is foundational for learning biology particularly in evolution and natural selection in future years. Therefore, students need to have many opportunities to practice this skill.
The teaching activity Classifying dangerous animals aims to give students the opportunity to practise this skill. The topic of dangerous animals was chosen as a hook as it is an area of fascination for many people. It is also an excellent group to choose as there are many animals from a wide range of phyla that are a potential threat to humans. Students start with a fun warm-up exercise using the class’s knowledge of how superheroes have gained their special abilities. They then start applying this knowledge to the dangerous animals that inhabit Australia. Students then use the supplied worksheet of images of some of these animals, and create a dichotomous key digitally or from printed materials.
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