The role and impact on education of International Large Scale Assessments (ILSAs) such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has grown considerably in the past few decades.ILSAs of student achievement offer a glimpse into broadly defined concepts of literacy and provide information on student and school level factors that have been shown to be associated with learning.This paper provides an overview of one such ISLA (i.e., PISA) as well as some examples of the research that can be accomplished with these data.Through the use of Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM), the results from PISA will be used to model relational patterns of student, home and school characteristics for Canadian students across these broadly defined concept of science literacy.It is anticipated that other researchers will find much from these models is transferable to China.