The International Schools’ Assessment at Avenues

By Andy Williams, Global Director of Teaching and Learning

“How is my child doing?” is always an important question for parents. There are three forms of assessment used at Avenues: standardized, summative and formative. Taken together, this assessment system allows us to evaluate multiple aspects of school and curriculum quality, and student growth.

The International Schools’ Assessment (ISA) is the standardized test Avenues has chosen to assist in evaluating school quality across multiple campuses over time.

Avenues students from 3rd grade onward take the ISA once a year. The ISA is based on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. It is designed and developed in Australia by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). The ISA is an internationally recognized assessment for literacy and mathematics, and for 8th grade, science.

From year to year, the ISA assesses to what extent the curriculum is facilitating growth in the target skills which prepare our students for college readiness and future success. The ISA affords us the performance data to confirm our alignment with rigorous international academic expectations.

At Avenues, standardized, summative and formative assessments are analyzed in a triangulated fashion in order to fully understand student growth and attainment. Thus the ISA provides one more aspect, a snapshot, of the continuous evaluation that is taking place at Avenues on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. Evaluations occur via the authentic assessment of student work expressed through projects, and are accompanied by common benchmark assessments centered on progress made towards learning core academic outcomes.

Each form of assessment is important, as each provides evidence in order to track growth toward our goal of developing world-wise leaders uniquely equipped to understand and solve global-scale problems.