Report by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the only nationally representative & continuing assessment of what America's students know & can do in various subject areas. This guide provides an overview of the NAEP project & acquaints readers with NAEP's informational resources, demonstrates how NAEP's design matches its role as an indicator of national educational achievements, & describes some of the methods used in the 1997 & 1998 assessments. The guide follows a Question & Answer format, presenting the most commonly asked questions & following them with succinct answers. Each answer includes additional background information.

The last several years have seen a growing resolve among educators and policymakers to assure the place of a solid arts education in U.S. schools. In 1997, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted a national assessment in the arts at grade 8. The assessment included the areas of music, theater, and visual arts. For each of these arts areas, this Report Card describes the achievement of eighth graders within the general population and in various subgroups. Taken with the information provided about instructional and institutional variables, this report gives a context for evaluating the status of students' learning in the arts. The arts assessment was designed to measure the content specifications described in the arts framework for NAEP. The arts have a unique capacity to integrate intellect, emotions, and physical skills in the creation of meaning. Meaningful arts assessments need to be built around three arts processes: creating, performing, and responding. To capture these processes, the arts assessment exercises included authentic tasks that assessed students' knowledge and skills and constructed-response and multiple choice questions that explore students' abilities to describe, analyze, interpret, and evaluate works of art in written form. Data are reported in overall summaries for creating, performing, and responding in terms of student- and school-reported background variables. Student results for theater are discussed in terms of teacher-reported background variables as well. The major findings of the assessment are that a large percentage of grade 8 students attend schools in which music and visual arts were taught usually by specialists; most students attended schools in which instruction following district or state curricula was offered in music and visual arts, but not in theater or dance; and most visual arts and music instruction took place in school facilities that were dedicated to that subject. (JH)