What is NAEP?
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what American students know and can do in various academic subjects. This is a congressionally mandated project of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. NAEP surveys have been conducted on a national sample basis since 1969 in reading, mathematics, writing, science, and other elementary and secondary school subjects. Its background information was limited to gender, race, ethnicity, and literacy materials in the home.
The United States Congress created the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) in 1988 to formulate policy for NAEP. Among the Board’s responsibilities are determining the content of NAEP and designing the assessment methodology. The Board has final authority on this. The Governing Board is a bipartisan group of 26 members that includes governors, state legislators, local and state school officials, educators, business representatives, and members of the general public. The NAEP assessment operations are carried out with assistance from contractors.
Since the 1980s, the array of non-cognitive questions expanded greatly. These now include not only race, ethnicity, gender, but also socio-economic status, parents highest level of education, type of school, disability, limited English proficiency, and since 2003, participation in Title I eligibility. They were used first to define a more extensive array of sub-groups of the student population. A second reason for collecting non-cognitive information is to inform educational policy by describing the contexts for learning, sometimes called opportunities to learn (Mullis, 2002). Broadly, this involves the content specified in the curriculum, whether and how that content is actually taught, students’ propensity to learn, as well as home and school factors that can enhance learning.
The primary purpose of NAEP is to provide fair and accurate information on student achievement. Its primary audience is the American public. The Governing Board believes that in serving its purpose and audience well, NAEP can contribute to educational research.
NAEP’s report is known as “The Nation’s Report Card”. This report card is designed to give a general picture of the levels of knowledge and skill among students nationwide or in a particular state. The scores of individual students and schools are not released; instead it provides results on achievement in academic assessments measuring the achievement of students on a broad range of content. The representative samples for each state reports on 4th, 8th, and 12th grades. The achievements are reported in two ways, scale scores and achievement levels. The NAEP scale score results provide a numeric summary of what students know and can do in a particular subject matter. Achievement levels categorize student achievements as below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced using ranges of performance established for each group. The report card also gives information on non-cognitive factors, descriptive information from students, teachers, and school administrators about demographic characteristics (race, ethnicity, gender…) and the educational process. In addition, supplemental reports that focus on particular aspects of the background data collected may be prepared. For example, this report presents data on teacher qualifications, socioeconomic status, computer usage, hours spent watching television, reading habits, and other demographic and school information that can be used to determine factors affecting achievement. In all cases, NAEP reports published by the National Center for Education Statistics must not state conclusions as to cause and effect relationships and avoid simplistic presentations that imply best practice.
All the materials generated by NAEP are accessible to be used as models for designing assessments or revising curricula. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) grants members of the educational community to use NAEP data. To accomplish this, since the 1994 assessment, all reports and data have been placed on the World Wide Web. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard.
The results reported on the last report show big discrepancies between NAEP results and the student’s performance on the test given by individual states. State results indicated that more students are proficient than the NAEP results. The controversy is clear supporters of NAEP said that the states tests are too easy. State officials’ says the NAEP’s achievement levels are too high and difficult for the average student to reach.
Dr. Dorothy Realdine, Director of Mathematics and Science at the Bridgeton Public School system said “The lack of motivation when students take the NAEP test plays a big part in the results. Because the results have no consequences, students do not put as much effort in the state test.”
To summarize, I think the NAEP has played an important role in establishing all the later initiatives: No Child Left Behind NCLB-2002, Benchmarking for Success-2008, Race to the Top-2009, and reform NCLB-2011. By no means should be the only measurement tool, however because they have been actively accumulating data we should not ignore those results. As the United States becomes more competitive in the global economy, I strongly believe we would need to embrace the NCLB and accept that it is not going anywhere. The five steps established by the National Governors Association; (1) developing international benchmarking, (2) aligning textbooks and materials, (3) improving standards for educators, (4) evaluation of student performance, and (5) measure student achievement to global standards are the way to build a globally competitive education system. NAEP is there and will continue doing its mandate, to provide fair and accurate information on student achievement to the American public.
References:
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
http://www.achieve.org/BenchmarkingforSuccess
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