This guide to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is designed to help the secondary data analyst use the NAEP and to introduce some of the sophisticated technology used by the NAEP. The NAEP has been gathering information on American students since 1969. It samples populations that consist of all students in U.S. schools, both public and private, at grades 4, 8, and 12, as well as ages 9, 13, and 17. NAEP data are designed for measuring trends in student performance over time and for cross-sectional analyses of the correlates of performance. Since the introduction of the Trial State Assessments in 1990, the NAEP has also been used to compare the performances of students in participating states. All data collected by the NAEP are available for the secondary user. This primer, which assumes that the user has a working knowledge of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, gets the user started on the simplified database and introduces a few special features of the NAEP. The examples use a set of 1,000 eighth graders assessed in mathematics. These mini-files are used to illustrate several basic NAEP analyses. Five appendixes present file layouts and variable information, as well as a guide to using the attached primer computer disk. (Contains 28 figures, 2 tables, and 46 references.) (SLD)