A precast insulation reinforced concrete shear wall with diagonal bracing is studied. Four triangular hollow areas are reserved inside the wall, in which the insulation boards are filled. The inclined steel bars are set along the diagonal direction in the wall. The low cyclic reversed loading experiments were carried out on three diagonal bracing insulation shear walls with three different shear span ratios of 1.0, 1. 5 , 2.0 respectively. Systematic analyses were made on failure modes, hysteretic curves, skeleton curves, bearing capacity, deformation capacity, stiffness degradation and energy dissipation capacity of the different specimens. The same experiment on an ordinary shear wall with shear span ratio of 1.5 was carried out to make a comparative analysis of the seismic behavior. At last, numerical simulations of these specimens were made by finite element analysis software ABAQUS. The results show that with the same shear span ratio, the bearing capacity of the insulation shear walls with diagonal bracing is slightly lower than that of the ordinary shear wall. However, the development of cracks is delayed. The ductility is improved and the energy dissipation capacity of the wall is increased significantly, which is helpful to resist earthquake action. As for insulation walls with diagonal bracing, with the increase of shear span ratio, the bearing capacity decreases, whereas the deformation ability increases. The stiffness degradation delays and energy dissipation capacity increases. Moreover, it has been proved that FE model can well simulate the seismic behavior of the specimens by the comparisons with experiment results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]