National Academies Press: OpenBook

A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies (2022)

Chapter: 6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations

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Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
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6

Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations

Chapter 5 discussed the efficiencies and cost savings in test administration associated with the transition to a locally based model and Chapter 4 discussed the consideration of the mix of item types, which could indirectly affect administration time. This chapter discusses four other possible strategies that could also be explored to reduce the cost of test administration: increasing the information gathered from each sampled student by testing them for longer periods to include two subjects; conducting statistical power analyses to reevaluate the sample sizes needed to support the desired comparisons; increasing the efficiency of testing time by using computer-adaptive testing methods; and sharing administration resources with NCES’s international assessments for assessments with overlapping student populations.1

In all cases, the potential savings from the innovations discussed in this chapter would be dampened by a move to the local administration model (detailed in Chapter 5). That is, the innovations discussed in this chapter potentially provide other ways to reduce administration costs, but a successful transition to local test administration would substantially reduce field costs, which would substantially reduce the possibility for these innovations to save money. However, several of the innovations offer the

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1 Another set of strategies using artificial intelligence could provide opportunities to support the proctoring of tests during administration by such means as monitoring test-taker behavior with computer vision and real-time analysis of process data; however, the panel concluded that they would be too controversial for a mandated federal program related to K–12 education.

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×

possibility of reducing the burden on schools or students, which is also an important objective.

TESTING TWO UNRELATED SUBJECTS FOR EACH STUDENT

NCES is currently exploring the possibility of assessing two unrelated subjects by testing students for a longer time, with 90 rather than 60 minutes for the cognitive items. Originally, this plan was designed to allow three 30-minute blocks of cognitive items rather than two, with two blocks for one subject and one block for the other.2 More recently, NCES is looking at a model using a short router (see “Adaptive Testing,” below) and one longer block for each subject, totaling 90 minutes.3 Other models are possible, including using the extra block of time to pilot new items, which is one approach that could be used to reduce NAEP’s high costs for pilot testing (see Chapter 4).

NCES estimates that two-subject administration would require an investment of $10 million to cover three studies, two in 2026 to examine a two-subject design, one with a traditional linear test design and one with adaptive test design, and a bridge study in 2028.4

NCES estimates that two-subject administration would allow sample sizes to be reduced by one-third without changing NAEP’s precision.5 The estimates include an expectation that multisubject testing will be coupled with adaptive testing, but the sample size reduction would largely be based on the extra time per student.6 NCES estimates that two-subject NAEP testing will save $17 million from 2028 through 2030.

As discussed in Chapter 5, NCES currently estimates the savings from the use of local administration for the mandated assessments by a cost reduction from $3,500–4,500 per school in 2024 to $2,000–3,000 in 2030 over a base of 15,500 schools. The expected savings from two-subject administration produces further savings by reducing the number of sampled schools by one-third, initially to 13,500 in 2028 and then to 10,500 in 2030.7 In 2028 there would be 2,000 fewer schools when the per-school

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2 Interestingly, NAEP did try a three-block, two-subject design in the 1985–1986 administration (Beaton et al., 1988).

3 NCES (personal communication, December 17, 2021).

4 NCES response to Q57e.

5 NCES response to Q57f.

6 NCES response to Q71a. Although “an adaptive design likely will not result in significant sample size reductions or error reductions to the two-subject design,” in the context of two-subject designs, “adaptive design could potentially help to stabilize the group score estimation when, as an outcome of the two-subject design, the testing time for half of the student sample on a given subject is less than what’s currently offered in NAEP.”

7 Cost-per-school figures from NCES (personal communication, November 10, 2021).

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×

cost is expected to be $2,700, and in 2030 there would be 5,000 fewer schools when the per-school cost is expected to be $2,500.8 These estimates produce a savings of $17.9 million for the 2 years.

The use of tests with 90 minutes for the cognitive items across all NAEP assessments has the potential to reduce the number of sampled schools and overall administration costs by roughly one-third. If the panel’s estimate is correct that local administration has the potential to reduce administration costs by about 80 percent, then the remaining average annual administration costs in a decade should be roughly 20 percent of their current values: $7.2 million for the assessments and $1.0 million for the pilot administration.9 If 90-minute tests can reduce these administration costs by one-third, that might represent an annual average savings of $2.7 million by 2030, which is 1.6 percent of NAEP’s overall budget.

The potential savings in the next few years from using tests with 90 minutes for the cognitive items—before local administration is implemented—would be much larger because the overall administration costs are currently much larger. For example, a one-third reduction of the current average annual assessment administration cost of $36 million would be $12 million.

In addition to the potential cost savings for administration, joint information about student performance on two subjects could provide additional information about the dependencies in proficiency across subjects by looking at the relationships between the subjects by student.10

There are several issues that need to be addressed to decide if multisubject testing is feasible for NAEP. In particular, the program needs to investigate the effects of longer testing time in relation to its impact on both student results and on the scheduling for schools. Although either of these factors could pose problems, many state assessments are longer than NAEP’s typical two-block assessments and, as noted in Chapter 2, NAEP has already tried longer assessments in science and technology and engineering literacy.

Beyond the longer testing time, there are issues related to balancing subject order across blocks, estimating plausible values11 from one-subject

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8 Cost-per-school figures from NCES (personal communication, November 10, 2021). Midpoints used for each range given for the cost per school.

9 See Chapter 5 for the calculation of an average annual assessment administration cost of $36 million and an average annual pilot administration cost of $2.5 million; the figures in the above test use 20 percent of these two figures.

10 Joint performance information might also provide information related to the potential integration of two subjects; see discussion in Chapter 3.

11 See the discussion of plausible values in “Structure” in Chapter 2.

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×

blocks, and designing an appropriate bridging study for the transition.12 NCES is aware of the challenges related to moving to longer dual-subject tests and has designed a study to evaluate the impact of these changes well ahead of any adoptions. The study was originally scheduled for 2021 and was delayed by the pandemic.

RECOMMENDATION 6-1: The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) should continue to develop its plan to administer NAEP in longer sessions that allow for 90 minutes for the testing of cognitive items for each student. NCES should explore other models for using longer tests, in addition to its current plan. The decision to use longer tests should be based primarily on their potential to reduce testing burden by reducing the number of sampled students and to understand dependencies in proficiency across subjects, rather than being based on any long-term cost savings, which would be minimal with local test administration.

RECONSIDERING THE SAMPLE SIZES NEEDED TO ACHIEVE NAEP’S PURPOSES

Test administration costs—particularly in the current model—are directly related to the size of NAEP’s sample. If it is possible for NAEP to perform its mission with smaller sample sizes, there could be substantial cost reductions.

Assessing NAEP’s statistical power and its corresponding costs requires specifying the target parameters for estimation. Although technical considerations can inform the choice of target parameters, the desired parameters here are ultimately a policy determination. The implied questions that NAEP answers are referenced in the NAGB statement of NAEP’s purpose:13

NAEP results describe educational achievement for groups of students at a single point in time, progress in educational achievement for groups of students over time, and differential educational achievement and progress among jurisdictions and subpopulations.

This statement implies several target parameters. At the highest level, there is achievement at a single point in time, for example, an average scaled score for a single state or the country. In addition, there is progress over

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12 “Plans for Design of 2021 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments,” PowerPoint presentation by Enis Dogan and Helena Jia to the NAGB Meeting, March 6, 2020. Available in the project Public Access File.

13 See https://www.nagb.gov/content/dam/nagb/en/documents/what-we-do/quarterly-boardmeeting-materials/2020-03/11-intended-meaning-of-naep.pdf, p. 2.

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×

time, for example, the change in mean achievement scores in a state or the country from 2017 to 2019. NAGB’s statement also specifies “differential progress among jurisdictions,” which amounts to asking whether one state or urban district makes more educational progress than another. Because this last question compares two mean differences, this is a “difference in differences.” Then, the statement mentions differential progress “among jurisdictions and subpopulations.” This parameter amounts to asking, for example, whether gender gaps are increasing more in one state than another. Because this compares a gap over time, in two different states, this is sometimes called a “triple difference.”

As an example, consider the 2019 NAEP estimate for the performance of English-language learners in Shelby County, Tennessee, which is one of the urban districts included in the Trial Urban District Assessment program. The mean score of this population was estimated to be 180, with a standard error of 4.1.14 Assuming the same standard error in 2 years, a trend difference would need to be 11.4 points (an effect size of roughly .33) to be statistically significant at the 5 percent level. And if one wanted to compare that trend difference in Shelby County to the trend difference in another jurisdiction (with comparable standard error), the difference in trends for English-language learners between the two jurisdictions would have to be 16.1 points to be statistically significant.

With a larger sample, NAEP’s estimates would be more precise. For example, if the sample for Shelby County doubled in size, the standard error would decrease roughly to 2.9 and it would be possible to detect a trend difference for Shelby County as small as 8.1 points.15 Conversely, if the sample for Shelby County were cut in half, the standard error would increase to 5.8, and the smallest trend difference that could be detected for Shelby County alone would be 16.1 points.

There is a direct relationship between the size of NAEP’s sample and the performance differences that NAEP can detect. The size of the score-level differences that are educationally and politically meaningful for comparing student performance across jurisdictions over time and across groups can be used to determine the sample size needed for NAEP to be able to detect those differences, which will then affect the cost of NAEP’s data collections.

An analysis of NAEP’s statistical power could determine if NAEP can identify the performance differences that are educationally and politically

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14 NAEP results can be obtained from the NAEP Data Explorer at https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/data. The “generate reports” link can be used to specify “global formatting options,” which can include providing standard errors.

15 We note that the simple numerical comparisons in this paragraph ignore the complexities of calculating standard errors in NAEP, which require (among other things) considerations of student clustering within schools, the sparsity of observations for each student, and the number of test items given to each student.

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×

meaningful even with a substantially smaller sample than is collected today. However, it is possible that such an analysis could instead suggest that NAEP actually requires larger samples to detect the kinds of performance differences that are educationally and politically meaningful.16

RECOMMENDATION 6-2: The National Center for Education Statistics should commission an analysis of the tradeoff between NAEP’s sample sizes and its statistical power in detecting differences in performance, including trends and gaps, and its ability to achieve minimum cell sizes for reporting on subpopulations. In particular, this analysis should consider the stated purposes of the National Assessment Governing Board to measure not only average scores, but also differences over time and between targeted subpopulations, and it should provide evidence about the level of precision required for these results to be meaningful to educators and policy makers. Evidence about meaningful levels of statistical power and minimum cell sizes for subpopulations should be directly related to the implications for NAEP’s sample sizes and associated administration costs.

ADAPTIVE TESTING

Computerized adaptive testing has been effectively used in large-scale testing since the mid-1990s. A typical adaptive test sequentially administers test questions and uses students’ responses to assign subsequent questions at appropriate levels of difficulty until scores reach prescribed levels of precision or decision accuracy. Computer-adaptive multistage testing is a variation in which the adaptation occurs for groups of items, rather than for individual items (Luecht, 2014). A well-documented advantage of adaptive testing is that it can efficiently improve the accuracy of individual and aggregated scores or reduce test time while maintaining accuracy (Lord, 1980; Ul Hassan and Miller, 2019; van der Linden and Pashley, 2010; Verschoor et al., 2019).

In principle, the optimization offered by adaptive testing could be used to decrease the size of NAEP’s sample, reducing administration costs and the burden on schools and students. The potential route for such cost savings relates to the two innovations discussed above: longer testing of two unrelated subjects and improving estimates at low proficiency levels.

Saving Costs with Adaptive Testing through Longer Testing of Two Unrelated Subjects

Because adaptive testing is more efficient than traditional

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16Mosquin and Chromy (2004) discuss the NAEP sample sizes needed for detecting policy-meaningful improvements in states in the context of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×

testing, it can result in shorter tests: successively selecting test questions likely to yield the most information about a student’s proficiency means students need to answer fewer questions to obtain an accurate estimate, allowing a shorter test. If total testing time turns out to be a key barrier to testing two unrelated subjects, adaptive testing could help reduce testing time to make the approach feasible. However, as described below, such reductions are likely to be modest, given the nature of NAEP’s items. Additionally, there may be simpler ways to cut back on time if that turns out to be necessary for testing two unrelated subjects without the challenges associated with adaptive testing: blocks could simply be reduced from 30 to 25 minutes, which was their length for many years.

Saving Costs with Adaptive Testing through Improving Estimates at Low Proficiency Levels

Adaptive testing can be used to improve the precision of individual scores, particularly at the high and low ends of the ability distribution, without incurring the additional cost for larger samples that might otherwise be required. Although NAEP does not report individual scores, adaptive testing has the potential to increase the precision of group estimates at the ends of the ability distribution and for jurisdictions with relatively small sample sizes. For the most part, NAEP obtains defensible and accurate estimates of the performance of lower-performing populations, but estimates for these populations tend to have higher standard errors than similarly sized populations at the middle and higher ends of the NAEP scales. Recent policy interest in NAEP has tended to focus on groups whose scores are often imprecisely estimated (Oranje et al., 2014, p. 378). For example, urban districts that are now estimated in the Trial Urban District Assessment program have smaller samples than states and tend to perform on average at lower levels on the scale; both differences result in higher standard errors. If NAEP starts to target its statistical precision more closely to a specific level necessary for policy decisions, with a goal to reduce sample sizes, adaptive testing could help ensure that statistical precision is adequate for lower-performing populations.

In addition to these cost-related reasons for considering adaptive testing, there are other potential benefits of the approach. Adaptive tests can improve the test-taking experiences of students at the low end by focusing more of the items at a test taker’s level. An improved test experience is important for a voluntary testing program for which there are no external motivations for doing well.

Although there are potential cost and non-cost benefits from adaptive testing, there would be significant challenges to implementing it for NAEP. The biggest barrier to the use of adaptive testing comes from several characteristics of the NAEP assessment frameworks:

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
  • Multi-item sets: Some subjects use a single stimulus for a large number of items.17 Because the items in these item sets typically vary in difficulty and the item sets themselves are not differentially difficult, these long sets of items do not allow significant adaptive routing within blocks (Swain et al., 2018).
  • Items requiring human scoring: All NAEP frameworks make extensive use of constructed-response items, many of which currently require human scoring (but see discussion in Chapter 8). This requirement limits any routing decisions to only the portion of the construct that is reflected by the machine-scorable items.
  • Subscale reporting: Some subjects call for subscale reporting, including both reading and mathematics. Subscales limit the efficiency of any adaptive approach because the adaptation needs to reflect each of the different subscales.

In addition to problems related to the frameworks, there are some costs related to a transition to adaptive testing. They include the investments needed to develop larger item pools for the low and high ends of the ability distribution that tend to be poorly covered in traditional tests, the costs of reassembling existing items into blocks at different levels of difficulty, and the cost of developing the technology for adaptive testing. These added costs would be justified by the opportunity to provide better information across the full range of student abilities, but they limit the ability to use adaptive testing to reduce costs.

Because of the requirements of NAEP’s frameworks, computer-adaptive testing at the item level and across all subscales is not practical. The practical problems can be addressed in multistage adaptive testing, in which the adaptation occurs over groups of items and the first stage is limited to items that can be automatically scored, but this approach may prevent the use of some item types and may omit consideration of some subscales in the adaptation. NCES has been investigating the use of multistage adaptive testing at least since 2011 (Oranje et al., 2014, p. 374). In the simplest version, the first stage used for adaptation may have the characteristics of a simple screener for routing test takers to full cognitive blocks at different levels of difficulty, an approach that NCES has recently started to consider.18 The coarse adaptation that is possible is unlikely to result in substantial efficiencies across the full population, but it could improve estimates for some groups, particularly low-performing students. At the same time, however,

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17 The reading Framework (NAGB, 2019b) is the most prominent example of this approach.

18 NCES (personal communication, December 17, 2021).

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×

this approach could raise problems if the screener indicates the advisability of below-grade testing for which there is no framework.

RECOMMENDATION 6-3: The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) should not pursue adaptive testing for NAEP as a way of saving costs, but the agency should continue to investigate its use for its potential to improve the precision of statistical estimates and the test-taking experiences for low-performing students. NCES should also consider that no single approach to adaptive testing may fit all subjects and that some changes to assessment frameworks may be necessary to facilitate adaptive administration.

COORDINATING RESOURCES WITH NCES’S INTERNATIONAL ASSESSMENTS

In addition to NAEP, NCES sponsors two major international assessments for which data are collected in U.S. schools, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Program for International Student Assessment. NCES also conducts linking studies to connect these assessments. Currently, all these assessments use separate instruments and independent data collections. In the mid-2010s NCES considered an effort to integrate these assessments (as the “NCES Integrated Assessment System”) to coordinate data collection and promote sharing of item pools and even assessment components.19

In principle, the integration of sampling and data collection activities across education surveys could result in substantial cost savings, as well as improve the quality of data collected and facilitate a range of special studies and linking activities. However, realizing these improvements would require a high level of coordination across separate programs.

The easiest way to recognize efficiencies in NCES assessments would be to coordinate the data collections for the school-based assessments, while leaving the structure and content of the assessments intact. For example, in a year in which both NAEP and TIMSS were in the field, one might assign TIMSS sessions to schools that had been sampled for NAEP and then administer both assessments on the same visit. However, to reach this modest level of integration and achieve the savings it could potentially produce, it would be necessary to agree on a common assessment window, sampling schedule and plan, data collection contract, set of teacher and school questionnaires, and set of accommodations and exclusion policies. This level of

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19 NIAS Concept Paper (TR-0324), internal NCES document. Provided to the panel and available in the project’s Public Access File.

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×

coordination would be daunting to obtain across assessment programs that are each responsible to separate policy-making bodies.

Greater efficiencies and flexibilities could be realized if data collection were coordinated within assessment sessions and not solely at the school level. For example, within any classroom, some students might be taking NAEP while others were taking TIMSS, with still others receiving content from both assessments to facilitate linking. This approach would require further agreement on a common platform for technology delivery, assessment length, and block structure.

Even without reaching the level of coordinating the content of different assessments, the practical and political costs involved in achieving this level of coordination across separate assessment programs is likely to be overwhelming.

RECOMMENDATION 6-4: Efforts to coordinate NAEP test administration with the international assessment programs sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics should not be used as a strategy to reduce costs.

Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
Page 57
Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
Page 58
Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
Page 59
Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
Page 60
Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
Page 61
Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
Page 62
Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
Page 63
Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
Page 64
Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
Page 65
Suggested Citation:"6 Test Administration: Other Possible Innovations." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26427.
×
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The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) - often called "The Nation's Report Card" - is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what students in public and private schools in the United States know and can do in various subjects and has provided policy makers and the public with invaluable information on U.S. students for more than 50 years.

Unique in the information it provides, NAEP is the nation's only mechanism for tracking student achievement over time and comparing trends across states and districts for all students and important student groups (e.g., by race, sex, English learner status, disability status, family poverty status). While the program helps educators, policymakers, and the public understand these educational outcomes, the program has incurred substantially increased costs in recent years and now costs about $175.2 million per year.

A Pragmatic Future for NAEP: Containing Costs and Updating Technologies recommends changes to bolster the future success of the program by identifying areas where federal administrators could take advantage of savings, such as new technological tools and platforms as well as efforts to use local administration and deployment for the tests. Additionally, the report recommends areas where the program should clearly communicate about spending and undertake efforts to streamline management. The report also provides recommendations to increase the visibility and coherence of NAEP's research activities.

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