Introduction
The annual assessment of pupil´s learning outcomes in compulsory education is regulated by Spanish legislation both at national and regional levels. The different regions in the use of their competences are in charge of the development, dissemination, application and correction of tests given to students in their respective schools. In this context, this paper describes the features of the student’s assessment in the areaof Madrid called “Evaluación de diagnóstico”, which has been designed to allow for international comparability of the performance obtained by students in several matters that are usually included in the large-scale assessments.
The distinguishing feature of this assessment is in the development and application of mathematical and reading comprehension tests with educational and psychometric characteristics contrasted and the establishment of a standard for the international comparison with the scale set out in the Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA). These tests have been adapted and validated for usewithSpanish population and are named ESP-ISA tests.
The ESP-ISA tests are a contextualized adaptation of the assessment tests used in the program International Schools’ Assessment - ISA (designed and implemented by the Australian Council for Educational Research in 2001) to the Spanish educational system. The ISA program is based on the PISA program.
The design of the assessment and the ESP-ISA tests used, built from ISA items data base and related to PISA scale (because released PISA items are included in the test), ensures that the results can be compared with PISA, as well as allowing all the Madrid results can be equally expressed in that scale, since the sample of students that answer the ESP-ISA tests also complete the tests applied to the general population.
This paper aims to describe the tests building process, which can be divided into three major phases: a) itemstranslation to Spanish language, b) pilot study, c) itemselection and preparation of the final test in a PISA way. The specific features of the items and PISA test type are factors that determine the type of psychometric analysis to be used for judge theiradequacy and working. Aspects such as inter-rater reliability, the correlation point-biserial, the itemdifficulty or fit rateprovided for theIRT partial creditanalysis, have been considered for make the final assessment tests.

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