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

Image of report cover
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.
Project

NCES Data R Project - EdSurvey

The released EdSurvey Version 2.0 is designed for the analysis of national and international education data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). EdSurvey gives users the ability to process and analyze these data efficiently, taking into account their complex sample survey design and the use of plausible values. EdSurvey is an R statistical package developed by AIR, tailored to the processing and analysis of NCES large-scale education data with appropriate procedures.
13 Dec 2016
Blog Post

Taking a Page from Education to Improve Healthcare

Education has borrowed many ideas from the medical field. Now a new initiative shows the exchange isn’t just a one-way street. Bookmarking, a widely-used method for establishing student proficiency levels in major education tests—such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress—is being adapted to healthcare so patients and their families can better communicate the severity of symptoms. In this blog post Michelle Langer and Ellen Schultz explain this innovative new approach.
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