PISA results and the IB - Do IB students do better on standardised assessments

DUBAI HEALTHCARE CITY, UAE - March 18, 2020 - PRLog -- SISD recently announced the results of our PISA assessments. We're delighted with our students' performance: they comfortably beat the average for Dubai private schools - if SISD were a country, it would rank higher than Switzerland. It has also been accurately reported that IB students outperform all other curricula represented in Dubai. Why? "To do well in PISA, students have to be able to extrapolate from what they know, think across the boundaries of subject-matter disciplines, apply their knowledge creatively in novel situations and demonstrate effective learning strategies." (PISA 2018 Interpretations) Does this sound familiar? It should, because it is aligned with our vision, to inspire future generations "to become confident and enthusiastic lifelong learners, ready to embrace the opportunities and challenges of a global world."

Why is this important?

The PISA, or Programme for International Student Assessment, was developed by the OECD to evaluate its member nations' educational performance. It involves testing 15-year-old students in math, science, and language skills at a higher level than the average aptitude test.

SISD's solid performance in the PISA results is yet another reflection of the trend that illustrates how IB students generally perform better in these standardised tests among International Schools. It also shows how schools in Dubai are doing very well overall - in fact, private schools in Dubai, taken as a group, ranked 19th out of the 79 countries in the OECD, well on target to meet the KHDA's targets.

Do IB students generally do better at tests like PISA?

Let's examine the results of IB students in a similar assessment, the International Schools' Assessment (ISA). Created by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), the ISA is modeled after the PISA, and tests Grades 3-10 students from international schools, measuring performance in higher thinking and comparing these results on the international stage.

In 2009 and 2012, the International Baccalaureate (https://sisd.ae/international-baccalaureate-diploma-program/) commissioned the ACER to perform two separate studies, analyzing data taken from ISA assessments across 2007-2011. The objective was to determine how IB students performed against students from non-IB curricula. Dubai private schools (https://sisd.ae/)

In summary, the results were that the IB students performed significantly better than non-IB students, across all four fields tested by the ISA. This held true across all regions as well, with the exception of Asia/Oceania in which Grades 3, 5 and 8 students from non-IB schools outperformed IB students in Mathematical Literacy.