National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a nationally used assessment in the United States that is administered periodically to measure how well students are performing in the areas of reading, math, science, writing, the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history. While states are allowed to choose their own assessments to measure students' progress each year for purposes such as No Child Left Behind, NAEP uses the same test throughout the entire country. The items on the NAEP stay almost the same each year. These two factors allow the NAEP to compare students from every state and show their progress from year to year (Overview: The Nation's Report Card, 2009).

The NAEP is different from many other assessments in that it does not provide scores for individual students or schools. Instead, the NAEP gives results for different populations of students such as all eighth graders, males, or Black students. The main assessments are given to students in grades 4, 8, and 12 (Overview: The Nation's Report Card, 2009).

The NAEP is used for national, state, and long-term trend assessments. Nationally, public and private school students are assessed in all of the nine subjects listed above. Math, reading, science, and writing are reported at the state level for fourth and eighth grades. The long-term trend assessments are given every four years and have been used to show the trend in math and reading scores since the 1970s. The NAEP is not given to every student each year. Rather, selected samples of students take the test in the predetermined years (Overview: The Nation's Report Card, 2009).

Multiple-choice, short-response, and extended-response items are used to test reading, math, and science. In addition to the three question types listed above, a hands-on experiment is also given to some of the students participating in the science test. Two prompts are given for the writing assessment (National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Questions and Answers, 2005).

NAEP chooses students reflective of each state's student population to participate. First, they choose a representative sample of schools so that each different kind of school in the state is tested. From those schools, a sample of students is selected. These students should be representative of the population of students in the state. Each of those students is assessed in only one subject area (National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Questions and Answers, 2005).

Students with disabilities (SD) and English language learners (ELL) are encouraged to take the NAEP along with the typical students. SD and ELL students who took the regular state assessment can participate by using the accommodations allowed by NAEP (The Nation's Report Card, 2008). Frequent accommodations include extra testing time, individual or small group administrations, large print booklets, and math questions read aloud (National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Questions and Answers, 2005).

The NAEP reports scaled scores to show how much students in different groups and subgroups know about a given subject. The levels of Basic, Proficient, and Advanced are used to categorize students' achievement by classifying them in pre-established ranges of performance by grade (The Nation's Report Card, 2008). The Basic level denotes partial mastery of skills that are needed to perform proficiently at that student's grade level. The Proficient level can be considered average because it means that these students have a solid understanding of the material they should know for their grade. The Advanced level shows that those students are perfuming superiorly for their grade level (The NAEP Glossary of Terms, 2008).

As a school psychologist, the information I can receive from the NAEP is quite useful to me. The results allow me to compare the results of students in my state to the scores of students in other states or across the country. It also breaks the scores down by demographic groups of students so that I can tell which groups are performing well and which might need to focus on improvement. School psychologists can use the data produced from the NAEP to determine if there are areas where students in their state are performing poorly. After determining what these areas are, school psychologists can work with teachers and administrators in their schools to develop programs designed to strengthen students' performance where they are having difficulty. The NAEP is different than many of the assessments typically used by states because it assesses other areas such as art, history, and geography (The Nation's Report Card, 2008).

School psychologists and educators can use materials produced by NAEP for many purposes. Frameworks, released questions, and reports can be used to improve schools (The Nation's Report Card, 2008). The frameworks developed by NAEP cover a wide range of subject areas and assess thinking skills that students need to have. These frameworks are continually changing because they need to be work with the current educational environment. NAEP frameworks can be used to determine if the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades in each school are teaching appropriate skills. The frameworks are useful for modeling new curricula and evaluating assessments for use by the individual school or states (NAEP Framekworks, 2009). Released questions provide educators with strong examples of what good questions look like in their subject area (The Nation's Report Card, 2008).

References

NAEP Framekworks. (2009, April 7). Retrieved October 3, 2009, from IES National Center for Education Statistics: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/frameworks.asp

Overview: The Nation's Report Card. (2009, July 9). Retrieved October 3, 2009, from IES National Center for Education Statistics: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/

The NAEP Glossary of Terms. (2008, July 9). Retrieved October 3, 2009, from IES National Center for Educational Statistics: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/glossary.asp#cut_score

The Nation's Report Card. (2008, April 22). Retrieved October 3, 2009, from IES Natinoal Center for Education Statistics: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/faq.asp

What is NAEP? (2005, August 4). Retrieved October 3, 2009, from Florida Department of Education: http://www.fldoe.org/asp/naep/pdf/WhatisNAEP.pdf