Ensuring High-Quality Data on Student Assessment Results
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), led by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), is the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas. The NAEP Technical Review Project ensures that all NAEP publications and products are high quality (i.e., technically accurate and methodologically sound and robust), nonbiased, and accessible and cover a comprehensive range of relevant topics.
The goal of the project is to ensure that NAEP data are easily understood, fostering public trust in NAEP as the gold standard for educational assessments and a reliable source of information on the nation’s school-age population.
AIR supports the NAEP Technical Review project by providing technical reviews of various data reports and tools as well as data files and documentation.
Our Work Supporting NAEP
Balancing Precision With Usability for All Audiences
To ensure that NAEP data are useful for all audiences—researchers, decisionmakers, and the general public—AIR’s technical reviews focus on ensuring both readability and statistical, psychometric, and methodological accuracy. We strive to maintain technical rigor in all NAEP data products—including interactive dashboards, topical studies, and subgroup-specific reports—while also making these products approachable and easily navigable.
Ensuring All NAEP Products Are Accurate and Readable
AIR reviews The Nation's Report Card, the primary NAEP publication for communicating assessment results and information about students’ academic performance and learning experiences in various subjects.
In addition, the team reviews a variety of special reports and tools that focus on subgroups of students or topics of particular relevance:
Facilitating Analyses Using NAEP Data
AIR systematically reviews NAEP data files, data companions, and technical documentation, which provide researchers with the resources to analyze NAEP data easily and effectively. Specifically, we review the following products to ensure accuracy, consistency, clarity, technical rigor, and completeness:
- All variable information in the codebooks and the data files, including variable labels, variable values, value labels, frequency counts, and summary statistics for variables
- Scoring programs for the cognitive items across three statistical programs (SAS, SPSS, and Stata)
- Data companions, which provide overviews of assessment design, its implications for analysis, and guidance on the use of data files
- Technical documentation files detailing the processes for instrument development, sample design and weighting, data collection, scoring, material processing, data analysis and scaling, and creating the assessment database
