National Assessment of Educational Progress
NAEP results are designed to provide group-level data on student achievement in various subjects, and are released as The Nation's Report Card.
Other subjects such as the arts, civics, economics, geography, technology and engineering literacy (TEL) and U.S. history are assessed periodically.
Questions asking about participants' race or ethnicity, school attendance, and academic expectations help policy makers, researchers, and the general public better understand the assessment results.
Teachers, principals, parents, policymakers, and researchers all use NAEP results to assess student progress across the country and develop ways to improve education in the United States.
[3][4] NAEP uses a sampling procedure that allows the assessment to be representative of the geographical, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of the schools and students in the United States.
NAEP began in 1964, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to set up the Exploratory Committee for the Assessment of Progress in Education (ESCAPE).
Voluntary assessments for the states began in 1990 on a trial basis and in 1996 were made a permanent feature of NAEP to be administered every two years.
[citation needed] The development of a successful NAEP program has involved many, including researchers, state education officials, contractors, policymakers, students, and teachers.
This separation makes it possible to meet two objectives: Main NAEP assessments are conducted in a range of subjects with fourth-, eighth- and twelfth-graders across the country.
Other subjects such as the arts, civics, economics, geography, technology and engineering literacy (TEL), and U.S. history are assessed periodically.
However, a 2009 [9] pilot program allowed 11 states (Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, South Dakota, and West Virginia) to receive scores at the twelfth-grade level.
As authorized by congress, NAEP has administered the mathematics, reading, science, and writing assessments to samples of students in selected urban districts.
Main NAEP assessments are typically administered over approximately six weeks between the end of January and the beginning of March of every year.
The assessment takes advantage of many features of current digital technology and the tasks are delivered in multimedia formats, such as short videos and audio.
Additionally, in an effort to include as many students as possible, the writing computer-based assessment system has embedded within it several universal design features such as text-to-speech, adjustable font size, and electronic spell check.
[12] These publications use NAEP scores in mathematics and/or reading for these groups to either provide data summaries or illuminate patterns and changes in these gaps over time.
Research reports, like the School Composition and Black-White Achievement Gap, also include caveats and cautions to interpreting the data.
Recent studies have placed an emphasis on STEM education and how it correlates to student achievement on the NAEP mathematics and science assessments.
NCES initiated the NAEP-TIMSS linking study so that states and selected districts can compare their own students' performance against international benchmarks.
The NIES is a two-part study designed to describe the condition of education for American Indian/Alaska Native students in the United States.
Under the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, states develop their own assessments and set their own proficiency standards to measure student achievement.
A few studies from the recent past are listed below: NAEP's heavy use of statistical hypothesis testing has drawn some criticism related to interpretation of results.
[14] Hyde and Linn criticized this claim, because the mean difference was only 4 out of 300 points, implying a small effect size and heavily overlapped distributions.
They argue that "small differences in performance in the NAEP and other studies receive extensive publicity, reinforcing subtle, persistent, biases.
Math answers have penalized students who understand negative square roots, interest on loans, and errors in extrapolating a graph beyond the data.
