The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), known as the nation's report card, has chronicled students' academic achievement in America for over a quarter of a century. It has been a valued source of information about students' performance, providing the best available trend data on the academic achievement of elementary, middle, and secondary school students in key subject areas. NAEP's prominence and the important need for stable and accurate measures of academic achievement call for evaluation of the program and an analysis of the extent to which its results are reasonable, valid, and informative to the public.


This volume of papers considers the use and application of NAEP. It provides technical background to the recently published book, Grading the Nation's Report Card: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress (NRC, 1999), with papers on four key topics: NAEP's assessment development, content validity, design and use, and more broadly, the design of education indicator systems.

Table of Contents


Front Matter
1 Introduction
2 Families of Items in the NAEP Mathematics Assessment
3 Student Thinking and Related Assessment: Creating a Facet-Based Learning Environment
4 An External Evaluation of the 1996 Grade 8 NAEP Science Framework
5 Appraising the Dimensionality of the 1996 NAEP Science Assessment Data
6 Subject-Matter Experts' Perceptions of the Relevance of the NAEP Long-Term Trend Items in Science and Mathematics
7 Issues in Phasing Out Trend NAEP
8 Issues in Combining State NAEP and Main NAEP
9 Difficulties Associated with Secondary Analysis of NAEP Data
10 Putting Surveys, Studies, and Datasets Together: Linking NCES Surveys to One Another and to Datasets from Other Sources
11 Developing Classroom Process Data for the Improvement of Teaching