The International Schools' Assessment (ISA) is designed for students in Grades 3–10 in international schools, and schools with an international focus. The program offers assessments for Mathematical Literacy, Scientific Literacy, Reading and Writing.
Trusted by schools for more than 20 years.
The ISA has been supporting schools around the world since since 2002. Every year approximately 60,000 students from more than 60 countries take part in the ISA.
Use the ISA to measure and inform progress at your school.
Talk to the ISA team to find out how.
Informing school improvement with in-depth data
The ISA enables schools to:
- monitor an individual's or a cohort's progress over time
- measure a student's achievement to reflect on and address their strengths and weaknesses
- compare school performance and progress to an international cohort and schools in the same region
- compare results against schools with similar proportions of students with English-speaking backgrounds
- evaluate instructional programs against objective evidence of student performance, to identify gaps and measure growth.
Based on internationally endorsed frameworks
Designed by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), the ISA is based on the assessment frameworks of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and has been developed in consultation with international schools.† ACER has been instrumental in the implementation, management and reporting of large-scale international surveys and brings their experience in these types of assessments to the ISA program.
Like PISA, the ISA assesses complex higher-order thinking skills because it includes open-ended questions in Mathematical Literacy, Reading and Scientific Literacy, which require students to construct responses, for example, to explain their reasoning, to find evidence or to justify their opinion.
† Note that the ISA is not part of PISA and is not endorsed by the OECD.
ISA Introduction pack
Contains all ISA guides and documents, including our list of participating schools.
Webinars
The ISA team regularly hosts introductory webinars for prospective schools who would like to learn more about the ISA. Please select the session that best suits your time zone or register for an on-demand session.
Unpacking ISA reports: Key concepts
This session will cover the key concepts that underpin the reporting of the International Schools’ Assessment (ISA) and how you can use your results to inform teaching and planning across your school. The webinar will also explain the assessment’s scale, quantitative and qualitative measures of student progress and how to utilise the comparative data.
Session available on demand.
How schools can utilise the ISA for improvements in teaching and learning
This webinar offers schools an introduction to the key aspects of the ISA program. It provides practical guidance on the data that the ISA provides, and the insights that can be gathered, from identifying gaps in programming, recognising areas of growth and monitoring student progress over time.
Session available on demand.