The National Assessment of Educational Progress is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas. This paper describes a feasibility study to determine whether measurement at the lower end of the student distribution, including measurement for students with disabilities and English language learners, could be improved by introducing “accessible” blocks aligned within the NAEP content frameworks.

This study examined NAEP testing conditions in schools and investigated whether being assessed in less than optimal testing conditions is associated with lower student achievement on the assessments.

The reading and mathematics measures of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have been, and continue to be, reported on scales that appear to have the properties of “cross-grade” scales. The conclusion of this essay will be that evidence can and should be assembled to support, and make more precise, certain interpretations, while others interpretations should be discouraged.

This paper reviews the strengths and limitations of commonly employed linking methodologies, reviews the history of linking efforts involving the NAEP, and proposes a framework to consider linking utility and validity

The purpose of this paper is to recommend guiding principles, studies, and decision-making processes that can assist NCES in determining whether the results generated by an assessment based on a new NAEP framework can be validly reported on the same trend line as previous versions of the assessment.

This Issue Brief reports that the amount of reading and mathematics homework that students' teachers expected them to complete on a typical evening generally increased from first grade to fifth grade. Children in schools with higher percentages of minority students had teachers who expected more homework on a typical evening compared to children in lower minority schools. In addition, in all three grades, larger percentages of Black, Asian, and Hispanic children than White children had parents who reported that their child did homework five or more times a week.

This paper is a demonstration of how partitioning analysis can be used to help separate changes in reading and mathematical proficiency from changes in school populations over assessment years, using NAEP data.

This study addresses the threat to the validity of scores arising from differential and changing participation rates of schools and students in NAEP testing.

This report outlines a number of critical issues that should be addressed in order to allow states to explore and understand relationships between the performance of English language learning students on NAEP and on state assessments in this policy context.

For this study, the records of participants in the 2003 NAEP reading and mathematics assessments in four states were matched to state assessment records, and the standard errors of lowest and highest quartile students, based on the state assessments, were compared for all of the existing NAEP item blocks.

This study estimated the potential bias from "worst-case" scenarios of selective non-participation in NAEP, and examined the extent to which statistical methods can correct for that bias.

The purpose of this simulation was to assess the improvements in standard errors of estimates that could be expected if students participating in NAEP were pre-assigned to test booklets that were adapted to their level of performance based on their state assessment scores.