The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

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The National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP)

• Presented by
• Arooj Sikandar
• 09021718-006

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Background

• Over the past few decades, politicians, with the
  support of parents, have urged more
  accountability by public schools, and this has
  led to widespread testing.
• There have been examinations that different
  school districts have given to their students
  from time to time.
• Unfortunately, despite the prevalence of testing,
  there was too little uniformity of assessments.

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Background

• The spur to uniform assessments of educational
  performance coincided with an increasing role of
  federal government in education during the 1960s.
• But creating a statistical survey to provide
  uniform statistics was politically controversial.

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Background

1. Some states did not want to be compared to others
   on assessment scores
2. There was opposition to making the assessment a
   tool to provide individual student evaluations.
3. Political opposition the money spent on
   assessment might be better spent on improving
   education itself.
4. Political ideologies clashed.

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Introduction

• Despite all these issues, the US Department of
  Education launched
  The National Assessment of Educational Progress
  ( NAEP) in 1969 to produce national assessment
  summaries and state-based samples (permitting
  accurate estimates for each state) were added in
  1990.

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Objectives of survey

• Main objectives are to
• Assess the academic performance of fourth, eighth
  and twelfth graders in a range of subjects
• Reflect current educational and assessment
  practices
• Measure change over time

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Cont

• The NAEP is a collection of surveys with three
  separate assessments
• The main national provides the annual national
  figures.
• main state provides the state estimates.
• trend assesses change over time.

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Cont

• Each of these assessments consist of four
  components
• Elementary and Secondary School Students Survey
• School Characteristics and Policies Survey
• Teacher Survey
• Students with Disabilities or Limited English
  Proficiency Survey

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Cont

• The National Center for Education Statistics
  sponsors NAEP.
• The Educational Testing Service develops the
  assessment.
• Westat designs and selects the sample and conduct
  the assessment in sample schools.
• NCS Pearson scores the assessments.

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Cont

• Target Population
• School Children in grades 4, 8, 12
• Sampling Frame
• US elementary and secondary school children
  through US counties or groups of counties, listed
  schools and students within schools.
• Sample Design
• Multistage, Stratified clustered area probability
  sample of PSUs.

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Cont

• NAEP measures different subjects over the years.
• The design assigns different assessments to
  different students in each selected school.
• The content of the tests vary randomly over
  students, while measuring the same subject.

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Cont

• Sample Size
• 2000 schools and 100,000 students (National NAEP)
• 100 Schools and 2500 students per subject grade
  (State NAEP sample size per state)
• Self administered background questionnaires
  completed by students, teachers and principals.
• Cognitive assessments completed by students.

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Cont

• Mode of Administration
• Paper and pencil self administered questionnaires
  and cognitive assessment instruments.
• Time Dimension
• Repeated cross sectional survey
• Conducted annually

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Cont

• NAEP provides results regarding subject matter
  achievement, instructional experience, and school
  environment for population of students and
  subgroups (e.g., female students, Hispanic
  Students)

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Cont

• NAEP provides results regarding subject matter
  achievement, instructional experience, and school
  environment for population of students and
  subgroups.
• These are complex results and require more
  analysis to disentangle whether these are group
  differences between the 12th graders of 2000 and
  the 12th graders of 1998, based on experience
  they had in grammar school,

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Cont

• Or whether there are contemporaneous education
  policies producing the results.
• Despite the complexity of disentangling causes of
  the assessment levels, understanding these
  phenomena requires the kind of uniform
  measurement that NAEP offers.

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THANKS