Since the late 1960s, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)--the nation's report card--has been the only continuing measure of student achievement in key subject areas. Increasingly, educators and policymakers have expected NAEP to serve as a lever for education reform and many other purposes beyond its original role. Grading the Nation's Report Card examines ways NAEP can be strengthened to provide more informative portrayals of student achievement and the school and system factors that influence it. The committee offers specific recommendations and strategies for improving NAEP's effectiveness and utility, including: Linking achievement data to other education indicators. Streamlining data collection and other aspects of its design. Including students with disabilities and English-language learners. Revamping the process by which achievement levels are set. The book explores how to improve NAEP framework documents--which identify knowledge and skills to be assessed--with a clearer eye toward the inferences that will be drawn from the results. What should the nation expect from NAEP? What should NAEP do to meet these expectations? This book provides a blueprint for a new paradigm, important to education policymakers, professors, and students, as well as school administrators and teachers, and education advocates.

At the request of the Department of Education, the National Research Council formed the Committee on NAEP Reporting Practices to address questions about the desirability, feasibility, and potential impact of implementing these reporting practices. The committee developed study questions designed to address issues surrounding district-level and market-basket reporting.

The issues surrounding the comparability of various tests used to assess performance in schools received broad public attention during congressional debate over the Voluntary National Tests proposed by President Clinton in his 1997 State of the Union Address. Proponents of Voluntary National Tests argue that there is no widely understood, challenging benchmark of individual student performance in 4th-grade reading and 8th-grade mathematics, thus the need for a new test. Opponents argue that a statistical linkage among tests already used by states and districts might provide the sort of comparability called for by the president's proposal. Public Law 105-78 requested that the National Research Council study whether an equivalency scale could be developed that would allow test scores from existing commercial tests and state assessments to be compared with each other and with the National Assessment of Education Progress. In this book, the committee reviewed research literature on the statistical and technical aspects of creating valid links between tests and how the content, use, and purposes of education testing in the United States influences the quality and meaning of those links. The book summarizes relevant prior linkage studies and presents a picture of the diversity of state testing programs. It also looks at the unique characteristics of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Uncommon Measures provides an answer to the question posed by Congress in Public Law 105-78, suggests criteria for evaluating the quality of linkages, and calls for further research to determine the level of precision needed to make inferences about linked tests. In arriving at its conclusions, the committee acknowledged that ultimately policymakers and educators must take responsibility for determining the degree of imprecision they are willing to tolerate in testing and linking. This book provides science-based information with which to make those decisions.

At the request of the U.S. Department of Education, the National Research Council (NRC) established the Committee on NAEP Reporting Practices to examine the feasibility and potential impact of district-level and market-basket reporting practices. As part of its charge, the committee sponsored a workshop in February 2000 to gather information on issues related to market-basket reporting for the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). Designing a Market Basket for NAEP: Summary of a Workshop explores with various stakeholders their interest in and perceptions regarding the desirability, feasibility, and potential impact of market-basket reporting for the NAEP. The market-basket concept is based on the idea that a relatively limited set of items can represent some larger construct. The general idea of a NAEP market basket is based on an image of a collection of test questions representative of some larger content domain and an easily understood index to summarize performance on the items.

Assesses and reports the educational progress of students at grades 4, 8 and 12. National results are provided that describe students' reading achievement at each grade and within various subgroups (race/ethnicity, gender, parents' education level, public and nonpublic schools, and cross-state proficiency findings) of the general population. In addition, results are reported for individual states that choose to participate. This assessment includes a state-by-state component at Grade 4, as well as the national component at all 3 grades. Charts and tables.