When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program releases its reports on student achievement in various subjects, the data are added to the NAEP Data Explorer (NDE) website. The NDE has been shown to support reflective educational practices in the social studies. Working with assessment data can stimulate ideas for how teachers…

The relationship between teacher quality and student achievement is often at the heart of educational debates about student success. In this study, we leverage data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to explore relationships between geography achievement in the 8th grade and various indicators of teacher quality. We found…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation's Report Card, is the most comprehensive measure of student learning, and is widely considered the gold standard for empirically measuring trends in student achievement outcomes in the United States. The NAEP data for 2018, which were released on April 23, 2020, offer…

Would-be citizens must complete a multistep process that includes answering--in person and orally--10 questions selected from 100. These 100 questions range across civics, American government, US history, a bit of geography, and even major holidays and symbols. The revealing 2018 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation survey shows that…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), first administered in 1969, is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as civics, geography, mathematics, reading, science, U.S. history, and writing. The results of NAEP are released as The…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program periodically conducts national-level assessments of student achievement in geography. In July 2019, the National Assessment Governing Board announced a decision to eliminate geography, economics, arts, and foreign language assessments from the NAEP testing schedule through 2029. In…

Educational policy in the United States is highly decentralized. While the federal government subsidizes education across the country, and despite federal initiatives such as the Common Core and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers to establish national standards and assessments, most states maintain control over the…

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…

A goal of geography education is fostering geographic literacy for all and building significant expertise for some. How much time and practice do students need to become literate or expert in geography? There is not an answer to this question. Using two concepts from cognitive psychology--the ideas of ten thousand hours and deliberate…

In this article, Kathryn Roberts & Kristy Brugar discuss their assessment of third-, fourth- and fifth-grade children's understandings of the types of maps commonly found in their social studies text and trade books, and the knowledge and misconceptions it revealed. They then discuss how teachers might begin to address those issues with…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is an integral measure of academic progress over time. It is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what our nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as civics, mathematics, reading, science, technology and engineering literacy, U.S. history, and…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative assessment of what our nation's students know and can do in subjects such as the arts, mathematics, reading, and writing. NAEP collects and reports information on student trends and performance at the national, state, and district levels. NAEP releases…

All students need to know and understand the origins and evolution of their nation. They also need to understand the development of the nation's democratic institutions and ideals so that they are prepared to take part knowledgeably, as citizens and voters, in shaping America's future. The framework in U.S. history for the 1994-2018 National…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that many US students are deficient in core knowledge in geography, civics and current events. In this paper, a professor of social studies methods describes an action research project developed to assess and improve teacher candidates' knowledge in these areas. The article explains how data…

Nationally representative samples of about 7,000 fourth-graders, 9,500 eighth-graders, and 10,000 twelfth-graders participated in the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in geography. At each grade, students responded to questions designed to measure their knowledge of geography in the context of space and place, environment…