NAEP

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas. Assessments are conducted periodically in mathematics, reading, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history. It serves as a common metric for all states and selected urban districts and as a result, permits NAEP to provide a clear picture of student academic progress over time.

AIR’s work includes examining NAEP data in depth to provide insights into a wide range of topics, analyzing the achievement gaps in student performance by race/ethnicity, and maintaining a panel of experts that meets to commission and discuss research addressing validity considerations for NAEP.

Latest Work

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22 May 2019
Q & A

The Condition of Education: Frequently Asked Questions, Answered

Every spring, the National Center for Education Statistics releases an omnibus report, The Condition of Education. In this Q&A, Jijun Zhang, a senior research analyst at AIR who has worked on this report for a decade, explains how it is compiled, who uses it, and what it can tell us about the state of education—both today and over time.
28 Oct 2018
Report

Developing New Indices to Measure Digital Technology Access and Familiarity

As NAEP transitions from a paper-based to a digitally based assessment, the question arises: Are all children are ready for the transition—and would any of them would be disadvantaged by it? To investigate these issues, AIR developed a new set of survey items related to digital technology for the 2015 administration of the NAEP math and reading assessment.
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12 Apr 2018
Report

Weighted and Unweighted Correlation Methods for Large-Scale Educational Assessment: wCorr Formulas

This report introduces the methodology used by the wCorr R package for computing the Pearson, Spearman, polyserial, polyserial, polychoric and tetrachoric correlations, with and without weights applied. Simulation evidence is presented to show correctness of the methods, including an examination of the bias and consistency.
16 Oct 2017
Report

Identifying Text-Task-Reader Interactions Related to Item and Block Difficulty in the National Assessment for Educational Progress Reading Assessment

This study examines the nature of text-task-reader interactions in relation to student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment in order to suggest strategies that NAEP might use to select passages, develop items, and interpret data to more closely approximate the complex nature of reading comprehension.
NAEP Analysis paper report cover
24 Apr 2017
Report

Analyses Using Achievement Levels Based on Plausible Values

Achievement levels are important yardsticks in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program. In this document, we provide a detailed description of the plausible value method and demonstrate the method by replicating the analyses using SAS and comparing the replicated analysis results with those produced with NAEP Data Explorer. It is intended to provide a complete document for NAEP data users to easily adapt the methodologies with other statistical software packages such as SAS, Stata, R, and so on.
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