Recent research on statewide voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana has found that public school students that received vouchers to attend private schools subsequently scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students that remained in public schools. The magnitudes of the negative impacts were large. A case to use taxpayer…

The United States and much of the world is struggling with what "education" and being "educated" mean. Daily media are replete with debates on issues ranging from gender and class rights to the ideological and practical purpose of education. Prominent among these debates are discussions about whether education should be geared…

IES is the primary research, evaluation, and statistics arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Established through the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA), the Institute's mission is to expand fundamental knowledge and understanding of education and to provide education leaders and practitioners, parents and students, researchers, and…

Interrupted time-series (ITS) are often used to assess the causal effect of a planned or even unplanned shock introduced into an on-going process. The pre-intervention slope is supposed to index the causal counterfactual, and deviations from it in mean, slope or variance are used to indicate an effect. However, a secure causal inference is only…

This report uses NAEP background data to track time and learning since the mid-1990s in three areas: student absenteeism; classroom instructional time in mathematics, reading, music and the visual arts; and homework time expected by teachers. Key report findings are: (1) Students with higher rates of "monthly absenteeism" score…

In randomized controlled trials (RCTs) where the outcome is a student-level, study-collected test score, a particularly valuable piece of information is a study-collected baseline score from the same or similar test (a pre-test). Pre-test scores can be used to increase the precision of impact estimates, conduct subgroup analysis, and reduce bias…

Discusses how taking a multilevel perspective on item response modeling addresses certain analytic problems in using latent variables as outcomes in regression analyses. Application of the models to measurement error in the dependent variable of a between-student regression illustrates the adequacy of some National Assessment of Educational…

The "Nation's Report Card," 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. This report summarizes some of the sophisticated statistical methodology used in the 1992 Trial State Assessment of…

The 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) monitored the performance of students in American schools in reading, U.S. history, geography, mathematics, science, and writing. The sample involved more than 135,000 public and private school students who were 9, 13, or 17 years old and/or in grades 4, 8, and 12. This technical report…

A committee of the National Research Council studied the desirability, feasibility, and potential impact of two reporting practices for National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results: district-level reporting and market-basket reporting. NAEP's sponsors believe that reporting district-level NAEP results would support state and local…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only continuing measure of the achievement of U.S. students in key subject areas. The National Research Council's Committee on the Evaluation of National and State Assessments of Educational Progress conducted an evaluation of the NAEP. This report contains the conclusions this…

This paper describes a methodology, called Profile Analysis via Multidimensional Scaling (PAMS), designed to identify major patterns of variables and to study the relationships into which those patterns enter. Patterns of variables are here called profiles. The PAMS procedure has been adapted to characteristics of the National Assessment of…

This report is in compliance with Section 405(k) of the General Education Provisions Act which states that the Director of the National Institute of Education (NIE) provide for a review of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) at least once every three years and provide for public comment on its conduct and usefulness. To obtain…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) collects data in the form of repeated, discrete measures (test items) with hierarchical structure for both measures and subjects, that is complex by any standard. This complexity has been managed through a "divide and conquer" approach of isolating and evaluating sources of…

States participating in the National Assessment of Educational Progress State Assessment program (state NAEP) are required to sample at least 2,500 students from at least 100 schools per subject assessed. In this ideal situation, 25 students are assessed for a subject in each school selected for that subject. Two problems have arisen: some states…