Driving Transparency and Progress with Mapping State Proficiency Standards
Under the 2001 and 2015 reauthorizations 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. This has resulted in a lot of variation among state assessments, which inhibits the direct state-level comparisons necessary for understanding students’ ability levels.
In response to this challenge, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) commissioned a study to mathematically map each state’s standards for proficient performance on grades 4 and 8 mathematics and reading assessments onto common scales from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—an assessment all states participate in. These common scales help policymakers and educators understand how state expectations align with national benchmarks.
AIR's Work with NCES
AIR has partnered with NCES on state mapping studies since their inception more than two decades ago. These studies employ rigorous methodology to determine where each state’s proficiency standards fall on the NAEP scales, evaluate how they compare to NAEP achievement levels, and highlight trends showing how state standards evolve over time.
To make state-level NAEP equivalent scores more accessible, AIR created an interactive dashboard. This tool allows users to see both an overview of state performance mapped to NAEP proficiency levels and NAEP equivalent scores for each state.
AIR’s contributions to these NCES reports and data tools are vital for the NAEP community and beyond. These state mapping studies have made the relative rigor of states' proficiency standards more transparent, revealing a variability among states and showing that this variability has decreased over time.
AIR Helps States, Schools, and Communities Understand NAEP
In addition to supporting NAEP’s state mapping efforts, AIR has worked closely with NCES to develop various innovative ways to share a variety of NAEP data and improve its usability among researchers and decisionmakers.
- To streamline the multistep data-preparation process, we created the Data R Project, a set of open-source tools researchers can use to access, clean, and analyze NAEP data.
We built new communities and training spaces dedicated to NAEP, like the NAEP Research and Development Program.
- We conceptualized, designed, and produced a web series, Focus on NAEP, to explain NAEP concepts and processes and help general audiences understand how NAEP can help decisionmakers and educators support our students.
- We authored reports such as the NAEP Oral Reading Fluency Study and the many working papers within NAEP Data in Focus to examine key findings and research related to NAEP.
