National Assessment of Educational Progress

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “Nation's Report Card,” is a federally mandated program for assessing student achievement and progress in American education. The NAEP assessments cover areas such as reading, mathematics, science, writing, U.S. history, civics, geography, and the arts. The assessments are usually administered to randomly selected samples of students in such a way that different students in a sample typically receive different portions of a test. The sampling of students, administration, scoring, and reporting are done through a number of NAEP contractors, including the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Westat. The Commissioner of Education Statistics, as head of the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), is charged with the carrying out of the NAEP project. The National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), an independent bipartisan organization, develops the policy, content frameworks, and test specifications for the NAEP.

There are three basic components of the NAEP program. The long-term trend NAEP is designed to assess changes in student achievement in mathematics, reading, and science at ages 9, 13, and 17. The assessment is based on fixed content standards and administration procedures that were established from the beginning. A second component is the national NAEP, some times called the “main NAEP.” Unlike the trend assessment, the national assessment is grade based, targeting students at Grades 4, 8, and 12. It also covers more subject areas, such as U.S. history, civics, and geography, which are tested in different years. More important, the national NAEP is based on the latest content frameworks and assessment innovations. The third component, the state NAEP, is designed to assess reading, mathematics, and science in the same year as the national assessment. It uses the same assessment content and item types as the national assessment. It is available for students only in Grades 4 and 8. In addition to these assessments, NAEP also conducts several special studies, including the ongoing high school transcript study and the technology-based assessment.

The original development of the NAEP took place in the 1960s. It was a single assessment when it became operational in 1969. With the release of the A Nation at Risk report in 1983, there was a strong sense in the nation to improve the international competitiveness of the nation's education system. In 1986, an unexpected decline in the nation's reading achievement, the socalled NAEP reading anomaly, further prompted NAEP to redesign its program. One major result was the separation of the national NAEP from the trend NAEP, with the former measuring the achievement of the latest innovations in curriculum and instruction and the latter yielding results comparable to previous ones. To meet the special needs of the main assessment, NAEP developed content frameworks as outlines for what students should be able to achieve in each subject area. The second major redesign took place in the 1990s with the addition of the state NAEP, partly as a result of the enhanced accountability at the state level. The new assessment, originally called the “trial state assessment” (TSA), was first field tested in 1990 in a number of participating states and became an official component of the NAEP in 1996. During that time, NAEP also updated its frameworks for the major subjects and incorporated more performance-based assessment items. There was also a major change in score reporting, from the original percentage of items answered correctly to the report of scale scores for a whole subject and major content areas, and scores by achievement levels. More recent changes include the sampling of students with disabilities and students with limited English proficiency and the use of accommodations and modifications during test administration. NAEP has also made most of its information available online through its Web site. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 provided the federal mandate for the continuation of all three components of the NAEP. The act required reading and mathematics to be continued in all three components of the NAEP program. The inclusion of additional subject areas in the main NAEP is conditional upon available resources. Participation in state NAEP reading and mathematics is required of schools that receive Title I funding. The act also authorized NAEP to conduct the feasibility of a trial urban district assessment. The first assessment was given in 2002 for five urban districts.

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