PiRA Test

[AliTheMinx]

Hello! Please could someone explain what the PiRA test entails and what it is marked out of? My son seems to have a mark out of 55, but this doesn't seem to tally with anything I can find online! I will email his teacher, but as it's a weekend I just wondered whether anyone can shed a bit more light. He's very disappointed with his score, and I am just trying to figure out where he may have gone wrong and what it actually tests. Thank you so much!

It’s a reading assessment (comprehension kind of thing) and his raw score (out of 55) will be age adjusted so his teacher can see what progress he is making against previous performance and against age related expectations. So if he’s an august birthday a low score is less concerning for the teacher than if he’s a September birthday.
is this any help?

Thank you. That's very helpful. Is it just one reading comprehension or are there several elements within the test?

It’s three passages with questions (to be honest I’m in my first year of teaching and only know what my own year group does), we do one at the end of each term. For my year group it’s not unlike the SATS reading assessment.
is your son upset because of where he ranks in the class or because he thinks he ought to have done better than he did? I tell the children how they do, but never tell them how they rank - I don’t think it’s helpful to them - it’s more important to me that I can see what aspects of reading comprehension they find challenging (eg inference or retrieval) so that I know how to adapt and focus the next term’s teaching. The school finds it helpful to monitor how children are progressing as they move up through the year groups - so even if you’re a person who normally scores at the lower end of the range within the cohort they can check that you’re continuing to make good progress. (Eg not slipping from 50% to 25% or whatever).
If your son is still upset tomorrow I would email the teacher to say he was upset about the result. Just to make them aware of his feelings so they can think about how best to handle testing going forwards.

Thank you for being so very helpful. That's really good to know. I think he is disappointed, as he thinks he should have done better (and it does't help that he did very well in his PUMA, so I think he feels his PiRA mark is worse than it is in comparison!). Thankfully, I don't think they were told their rank (I agree this isn't helpful). He's in Year 5, and I have just tracked down his scores from Year 3 and 4, which were pretty good, and today's mark is considerably lower, so I have emailed his teacher to try to find out more about what went wrong and where marks may have been lost, etc. Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. It is greatly appreciated!

I hope you mean you plan to email his teacher on Monday morning rather than you've emailed her on a Friday night and she'll have it hanging over her all weekend?

I've emailed her now, whilst I have time, but am not expecting a reply over the weekend!

But she'll read it and then work on it. Don't email teachers outside school hours.

The actual scores are not particularly useful as there are a different number of questions for each test. As PP have said, the teacher will use the standardised score.

But...it's email. You send it at your convenience, the recipient replies at theirs. It's not like phoning them up on Friday night!

Also, presumably the teacher is teaching during school hours so won't be able to act on it then anyway.

Agreed! I can't email during teaching hours, as I work full-time too in Higher Education. I have to do nearly all of my life admin emails in the evenings, otherwise I simply wouldn't have time. As I previously stated, I don't expect a reply over the weekend and fully appreciate it may not be read until Monday. I receive many work emails in the evenings and over the weekend, and see no problem with it personally.