Grading the Nation's Report Card Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress (1999) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-8
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Also known as "the nation's report card," NAEP has provided periodic data regarding what American students know and can do for nearly 30 years. Throughout that time, NAEP results have been increasingly used by policy makers, educators, and the public as indicators of the nation's educational health.
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The congressional legislation that established the state NAEP program also mandated standards-based reporting of NAEP results; it stated that NAEP results should be presented both as overall scores and in terms of percentages of students who meet established standards for performance. Thus, in the l990s, most NAEP assessments have reported summary scores and the percentages of students performing at or above basic, proficient, and advanced levels of performance.
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. Serve an evaluative function by helping NAEP users know whether students' performance is "good enough." The establishment of performance standards in NAEP potentially allows policy makers and others to judge whether observed performance measures up to externally defined goals.
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However, several factors suggest that NAEP's design should be simplified: recent discrepancies between results from trend NAEP and main NAEP assessments; the burden on states and schools that is created by participating in multiple data collection efforts; and the inherent inefficiencies associated with the ongoing administration of assessments for every trend line that the NAEP program supports. Exploration and implementation of methods to merge the trend NAEP and main NAEP assessments, and to streamline the data collections for the national and state components of main NAEP, are clearly warranted.
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PROVIDING MORE COMPLETE AND INFORMATIVE PORTRAYALS OF STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT Summary Conclusion 4. The current assessment development process for main NAEP, from framework development through reporting, is designed to provide broad coverage of subject areas in a large-scale survey format.
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The development of such portrayals will require the use of multiple methods for measuring achievement that go beyond current large-scale assessment formats. The NAEP program has been a leader among large-scale testing initiatives with respect to developing and applying innovative procedures to assess more complex aspects of achievement, but it is clear that large-scale survey methods alone are not adequate for assessing complex aspects of achievement described in current frameworks.
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But we also recommend that multiple assessment strategies become a much more prominent component of the NAEP program and be used to measure, for example: achievement in subject areas not assessed frequently enough to establish trend lines; subject areas (or portions of subject areas) in which not all students receive instruction (e.g., fine arts, advanced mathematics)
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However, substantial efforts to these ends will result in better descriptive, evaluative, and interpretive information about American students' academic achievement and educational progress broadly conceived.
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