All students in Years 4, 5 and 6 will sit the International Schools’ Assessment (ISA) in early October this year. The ISA has been developed to help measure skills in Mathematical Literacy, Reading Literacy and Writing of students who attend international schools. ISA is based on the internationally endorsed Reading Literacy and Mathematical Literacy frameworks of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Over 55,000 students do the ISA testing world wide.
Our Year 4-6 children completed the ISA testing last year as well so this will be the second year that our students will be invovled.
Your child will complete a Reading Literacy test; a Mathematical Literacy test; and two Writing tests – each of which takes between 45 minutes and 1 hour to administer. The tests include both multiple choice and open ended tasks.
The ISA tests are externally marked and therefore we will not receive the results until early next term (Jan 2013). However once the tests have been returned we will pass on information about your child in the form of an individual report published on Gateway which was also the case last year. This will give you a detailed record of your child’s performance score within the ISA progress continuum, for each test.
This year we will also be one of two ESF schools trialling the Year 4 ISA tests with our Year 3 students. We have chosen to do this as it provides the school an opportunity to analyse the Year 3 data to measure the efficacy of our curriculum programme. The main aim will be to identify general trends in Reading, Writing and Maths to support further enhancements to teaching and learning between Year 1 and Year 4. The ISA tests change each year so our Year 3 students will not sit the same papers in Year 4.
Owing to the fact that the Year 3 students will be taking assessments that are not age appropriate, we will be using the data collected for internal purposes only and individual results will not be published to parents on Gateway or made available through other means.
For more information please visit the ISA website by clicking HERE.