June 8, 2009
Dear Parents:
As a part of our ongoing development of curriculum and assessment procedures at ISM we decided in 2005 to implement a standardized testing program. Standardized testing can provide data required for educational decisions ranging from the formulation of a student's individualized plan to the evaluation of curriculum effectiveness within the School. Standardized testing is one of the ways, among many others, to assess and compare our students’ progress with students of the same age in other countries.
ISM uses the International School Assessment (I.S.A.). ISA is an assessment created by the Australian Council for Education Research (A.C.E.R.) designed especially for students in international schools and we test our students in grades P5, M1 and M3 at ISM in February. We use these tests in the PYP and MYP years to ensure our curriculum is supporting students as they ultimately prepare for their IB Diploma programme. The ISA tests are based on the internationally endorsed reading and mathematical literacy frameworks of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In 2009, 46,000 students from 244 international schools took the ISA ACER tests.
What does the ISA Measure?
Reading
- Retrieving information
- Interpreting
- Reflecting and evaluating
Mathematical Literacy
- Quantity (related to number and measurement)
- Space and shape (related to geometry)
- Uncertainty (related to estimation, data and probability)
- Change and Relationships (related to algebra and functional relationships)
Writing (Narrative and Exposition)
- Content
- Structure
- Language (with attention to ESOL/ESL characteristics)
- Spelling
Purposes of Standardized Testing
The purposes of standardized testing and/or assessment are to help:
- evaluate academic aptitude and academic achievements of individual students;
- assess reasonable expectations of a student's ability;
- measure the mastery of essential skills and conceptual understanding;
- chart individual progress over time;
- establish the range of ability and achievement within a class; and,
- provide an objective basis for reporting student achievement and progress to parents.
The Results for 2009
Your Child’s Individual Results
If you currently have a child in P5, M1 or M3, you have now received your individual child’s results from the ACER tests they took in February. The report shows you where they scored and also gives you information on the average student score from the other international schools like ISM around the world.
Please take the time to review the ACER report for your child. If you have any questions about how they scored in a particular area, please see the Head of Primary or Secondary as appropriate.
Our Children’s Class Results
Our school-wide Curriculum Committee met this week to analyze the overall results and to look at trends which indicate where we may need to adjust our instruction and guide our delivery of the curriculum from KG to D2. Our students were above and below the world averages in some parts of these tests.
In order to make best use of the results, it is important to interpret them in the context of other information about students' achievement, provided by on-going classroom assessment and perhaps other external assessments. With such small class sizes, most statistical data received is insufficient to make valid judgments about ISM groups in general, but the information is specifically helpful to the school in planning our teaching programmes for the year ahead. Our curriculum committee and some teacher groups have already discussed the analysis of the detailed information provided by these tests and are setting specific teaching priorities for next school year using information gleaned from these results.
Curricular Priorities for 2009/10 - from our Analysis of the ACER test results
Primary
- All Primary teachers on both campuses have met to discuss the ACER results with the Heads of Primary and create curriculum action plans to be implemented in August.
- Connect reading with different writing genres
- Conduct formative assessments in writing and math
- Conduct school-wide moderation of reading, writing and mathematics assessments
- Focus Professional Development for Primary teachers on using the core ISM educational resources and learning strategies that we have in place consistently across grade levels in language arts and math.
Secondary
- Implement the new ISM Mathematics curriculum, that has been revised this school year, from August.
- New resources for M1-M3, in the form of texts, have now been purchased to use with the revised Math curriculum and new resources to support the M4-M5 Math curriculum have been ordered for August.
- Focus in English classes on writing sustained and unified narratives that reflect on values and attitudes, including writing thought-provoking stories with complexity of purpose, viewpoint or subject matter.
- Focus in English classes on organizing content, in exposition or argument, to show inter-relationships between ideas and to build to a logical and coherent conclusion. This includes teaching students to organize their writing skillfully; building and shaping ideas to an effective and satisfying conclusion.
- Encouraging the concept school-wide that every class is a language arts class.
- All MYP and DP English and Math teachers are meeting, regardless of Grade level taught, to further analyze the 2009 ACER results and create an action plan for curriculum enhancements in their discipline vertically from M1 to D2.
If you have any questions about how the curriculum action plans will be implemented from August, please see the Head of Primary or Secondary when Term 1 begins.
A Grain of Salt
We must remember that standardized tests are one test on one day. At ISM the test is done cold with no test preparation classes. Offering test prep classes at these age levels would contradict our philosophy of holistic education. We are more concerned with what the results can tell us about individual student performance and areas where there is a trend across a class at a certain grade level. ACER themselves note that: "In general, summary statistics of this kind should be interpreted with caution. Results showing a trend should be collected for a minimum of three years before conclusions about school-level performance are drawn."
At ISM, we worry less about comparisons of our students to the world averages on these tests. We allow every student to participate in the ACER tests, including those with special learning needs and ESL students. This can affect our class averages of course. Many schools exclude these children in order to post better averages. At ISM, we feel the object of the exercise is to inform teachers about our delivery of the programme and then to discuss where we can make improvements. The tests are important to us professionally; if they were not important, we would not be doing them.
We plan to continue with the ACER tests next year in Grade P5, M1, M3 and we intend to continue to gather information every year so that we can make a longitudinal analysis of our curriculum over time. The snapshot we receive from a single ACER test provides limited data for trends analysis, so we are looking forward to continuing our participation in an effort to improve our delivery of the curriculum for your child. While many schools in the world participate in the ACER tests, still many more do not bother with external standardized tests.
At ISM, we are determined to take every opportunity that may allow us to improve student learning. You may view a summary of the most recent ACER test results at the following link on the school website www.ismoshi.org/isaacer09.htm.
Best Regards,
Barry Sutherland
Chief Executive Officer
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