ISA - IB and ISA schools

The International Baccalaureate (IB) and the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) have an informal agreement to communicate about research projects using the International Schools' Assessment (ISA) that are of mutual interest. As part of its standard data gathering the ISA collects information about schools' curriculum profiles and about students' background including their age, sex and mother tongue. The IB and ACER are mutually interested in investigating what impact, if any, different school programs such as the IB’s Primary Years Programme (PYP) and Middle Years Programme (MYP) have on students' progress, and what kind of impact MYP and PYP programs have on schools and cohorts of students over time. ACER anonymises all data that it shares with the IBO to protect individual school and students.

In 2009 the IB commissioned ACER to report on how PYP and MYP students performed on the ISA. As a follow up to this study, IB again commissioned ACER to further document student performance on the ISA from 2009–11, as well as investigate perceptions, attitudes and wellbeing of IB students through student questionnaires. The findings of these studies have been released. The research summaries and reports can be found here.

For a summarised explanation of links between the PYP and MYP and ISA see Matching the ISA to the PYP and MYP curricula

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