The purpose of this National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Achievement Levels Validity Argument Report is to synthesize evidence currently available to address the validity of the interpretations and uses of the NAEP Achievement Levels. Validity is the extent to which theory and evidence supports or refutes proposed and enacted test…

Linking score scales across different tests is considered speculative and fraught, even at the aggregate level. We introduce and illustrate validation methods for aggregate linkages, using the challenge of linking U.S. school district average test scores across states as a motivating example. We show that aggregate linkages can be validated both…

Multiplicative reasoning is a key concept in elementary school mathematics. Item statistics reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment provide the best current indicator for how well elementary students across the U.S. understand this, and other concepts. However, beyond expert reviews and statistical analysis,…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress's (NAEP's) transition to an entirely digitally based assessment (DBA) began in 2017. As part of this transition, new types of NAEP items have begun to be developed that leverage the DBA environment to measure a wider range of knowledge and skills. These new item types include the science…

This article explores the associations between the achievement of economically disadvantaged students and the presence of state policies that include student achievement in teacher evaluations. We looked at student achievement across all 50 states from 2007 through 2013. A simple comparison of states with and without the policy suggested that…

This paper provides the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) community with information that may help maintain the validity and utility of the NAEP assessments for civics and U.S. history as revisions are planned to the NAEP…

Educational quality is a way to influence the future of the American economy (Hanushek, 1986). Large-scale assessments are designed to determine quality in education by measuring student achievement. A connection exists between the standards, teachers, and assessments that form a system of accountability within education. State and national…

During the past decade, the NAEP Validity Studies (NVS) Panel has been monitoring, studying, and commenting on potential issues with the validity of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) arising from changes that have been brought about by the adoption of rigorous state college and career readiness standards, such as the Common…

In support of the national movement to improve mathematics instruction and assessment, states and districts are looking for the best tools to measure student progress toward proficiency. There is a national dialogue about how to use 8th-grade measurements like ACT EXPLORE and NAEP as predictors of student success and school accountability. This…

Though measures of long-term academic performance trends are valuable to education policy analysts and policymakers, they have been hard to come by at the state level, where most education policy is made. Such data are either nonexistent prior to 1990 or are unrepresentative of statewide student populations. A continuous series of state mean SAT…

This paper describes a statistical linking between the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Grade 4 reading and the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) in Grade 4 reading. The primary purpose of the linking study is to obtain a statistical comparison between NAEP (a national assessment) and PIRLS (an…

This guide is designed to assist States, agencies, and/or facilities who work with youth who are neglected, delinquent, or at-risk (N or D). The information in the guide will benefit those who are (a) interested in implementing pre-posttests, (b) in the process of identifying an appropriate pre-posttest, or (c) ready to evaluate current testing…

In early 2001, to support an internal evaluation of the impact of changing exclusion rates on reports of statistically significant gains across states, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) sponsored research on imputation procedures of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for the excluded students and provided…

The aspirational model resulted from the authors' secondary analysis of the Mother/Child (M/C) test block from the 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress restricted data that examined the responses of the national sample of 8th-grade students (n = 1648). This test block presented no artmaking task and consisted of the same 13 questions…

This paper describes one of the first efforts by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to improve measurement at the lower end of the distribution, including measurement for students with disabilities (SD) and English language learners (ELLs). One way to improve measurement at the lower end is to introduce one or more…