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Week 05: Global Assessment Program
The International Schools Assessment is helping learners to become engaged in challenging learning opportunities appropriate to their readiness and needs.
The International Schools Assessment (ISA) is used to monitor the learning of 50 000 or so students in close to 300 international schools each year. The ISA assesses progress in reading, mathematics and writing and allows schools to monitor individual and group progress over time and to compare performances with international standards. Modelled on the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the ISA provides participating schools with data comparable to the PISA country data.
‘The schools using the ISA are international schools, with an international focus and a fairly mobile student population, so it’s of considerable value for them to be able to compare their results to those of countries that participate in PISA,’ says Dara Ramalingam, one of ISA’s Joint Project Directors at ACER. ‘Schools in countries that participate in PISA can compare student performance not only to national cohorts, but to the other schools that participate in any given ISA test administration.’ Taken together, says Dara, this shows schools how they’re performing against international standards.
While such comparison is useful, says Dara’s colleague and ISA Joint Project Director Glenda Robertson, a further benefit is that the ISA’s Interactive Tracking Report enables educators to monitor the performance of individual students and groups of students over time. ‘Tracking over time can provide schools with quantitative evidence of variations in the abilities of cohorts of students and individuals from one year to the next,’ says Glenda. ‘As one school leader puts it, “The longitudinal graphics…serve as an excellent method of drawing staff into a statistical analysis that would otherwise be rather impenetrable for many.”’
Likewise, says Glenda, the ISA’s Interactive Diagnostic Report makes it easier to identify trends and patterns in comparison with other ISA schools and to interpret diagnostic information, with pull-down menus so graphs can be instantly customised, by grade level, for reading, maths and writing.
Schools are also using the ISA for school improvement. According to one, ‘The ISA has become an important external measure of our school’s performance and is part of our strategic measurable objectives.’ Like PISA, ISA is collecting, analysing and delivering data, and that’s helping educators monitor and improve educational outcomes around the world.
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Week 52: State of the art psychometric and statistical analysis
Week 51: Assessing civics and citizenship
Week 50: International research into teaching and learning
GOAL 1
Learners and their needs
every learner engaged in challenging learning opportunities appropriate to their readiness and needs
GOAL 2
The Learning Profession
every learning professional highly skilled, knowledgeable and engaged in excellent practice
GOAL 3
Places of learning
every learning community well resourced and passionately committed to improving outcomes for all learners
GOAL 4
A Learning Society
a society in which every learner experiences success and has an opportunity to achieve their potential
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Pursuing Quality and Equity through Evidence
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