What is the effect of moving from the October Administration to the February Administration of the ISA, or vice versa?
Changing the timing of a school’s testing may impact upon trend monitoring. Overall, we see that there is a significant difference in performance for Grade 3 between October and February. The difference declines as students get older, so by Grade 10 on average there is virtually no effect. However, at an individual school level there may be quite a different picture, so any interpretation of trend results would be dubious. If a school changes the testing time, trend collection should start again.
