NAEP - Why Participation in the National Assessment is Important

Why Participation in the National Assessment Is Important

Understanding "The Nation's Report Card"

The degree of interest in education today is unparalleled in American history. More than ever before, parents, educators, policymakers, and others around the nation are concerned with the quality of our schools. Their concern lies in making sure that our children will have the knowledge and skills necessary to be productive members of the global economy and effective citizens of a thriving democracy. However, we can only know if our nation is succeeding in this task if there is solid, impartial, trusted information about what students know and can do, whether their performance has improved or declined, and the factors that may influence this performance. The unique role of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is to provide this information.

Established in 1969, NAEP (also known as the "Nation's Report Card") was created to fill an important void in the American education system. The nation's states, districts, and schools use differing assessments, so their results are not directly comparable. Many of these assessments are themselves periodically altered in ways that make them inappropriate for measuring progress over time. In addition, few of these tests yield results that can systematically be associated with study habits, teacher practices, and school policies.

Without the Nation's Report Card, Americans would lack the common yardstick needed to evaluate student performance objectively or to know with certainty whether that performance had changed over time.

Why Participation of Selected Schools and Students is Vital

NAEP reports and data are used for a variety of purposes by education leaders, policymakers, the press, curriculum specialists and developers, teachers, researchers, and others. But the Nation's Report Card can play this important role only with your help. There are many other activities (including assessments) that compete for available instructional time; this sometimes makes participation difficult, even though it is very important that schools and their students participate.

Schools are scientifically selected to be in the NAEP samples according to demographic characteristics that make them collectively representative of the entire nation. If these scientifically sampled schools do not participate in NAEP assessments and meet assessment requirements for reporting, the assessment data may lose the ability to inform our understanding of the educational system.

By participating in NAEP, schools and students selected for the samples provide important data that will increase the information available to educators and policymakers about the success of their elementary and secondary education programs. The school and student samples are carefully designed to accurately represent the nation's 12 million students in grades 4, 8, and 12 (or at ages 9, 13, and 17 for the long-term trend assessment) in public and private schools. The participation of each school and student selected helps ensure that NAEP truly reflects the great diversity of our nation's student population.

NAEP produces data for the nation, participating states, and some urban school districts in a number of different subject areas, for many demographic groups, and for combinations of demographic factors. Many of the groups on which NAEP reports are relatively small in the overall student population, and so NAEP results are based on small samples. Because the samples are small, the participation of each and every student is crucial in ensuring that NAEP gives accurate student performance estimates to represent all population groups.

With high levels of student participation, NAEP can help provide answers to important questions:

How has student performance in NAEP subjects changed?
Is the performance gap between student groups (e.g. White-Black, or Free-Reduced Lunch eligible and non-eligible) closing?
How do students in your state compare with students across the nation in performance on NAEP assessments?

What Schools and Students Are Asked to Do

NAEP makes it easy for schools and students to participate. NAEP assessments including background questions are designed so that they require approximately 90 minutes. Principals and teachers are asked to complete questionnaires--either online or on a paper copy. Teachers may also be asked to fill out questionnaires for their English language learners and students with disabilities. The NAEP assessment and all necessary materials are brought to the school, administered and processed afterward by NAEP field staff.

Samples of schools are selected so that in most states or districts only a small percentage is asked to participate; thus, the majority of schools and students are in no way burdened. NAEP requires administrative help from a designated NAEP coordinator in each participating school, but NAEP field staff assigned to each school ensure that work for the assessment takes up as little school staff time as possible.

Participating schools have the opportunity to sign up for MySchool, a website designed to notify schools about assessment activities.

Giving Back to Schools

NAEP thanks participants in several ways. Educational materials used in the assessments such as atlases, science kits, and pencils are given to the schools for their use. Certificates of participation are also given to the students in the sample for their participation and efforts.

In addition, the NAEP website offers a number of useful tools such as the NAEP Questions Tool, a searchable database of questions used on past NAEP assessments. The questions may be used in any suitable way that educators, parents, or students wish.

Modeling Quality Assessment

Committees of nationally respected content experts oversee the development of NAEP frameworks and assessment instruments and strive to make NAEP an interesting learning experience for participants. Students respond to various types of questions, and are often asked to create their own answers to challenging problems. Many NAEP assessments have special features. In the science assessment, for example, some participating students perform hands-on experiments. In the NAEP geography assessment, students work with actual classroom atlases and create their own maps and charts.

Maintaining Confidentiality

The assessment questions and NAEP data are kept strictly confidential. Students do not receive individual scores, and reports for individual schools are not prepared. Students' names are not on NAEP materials that leave the schools. NAEP reports results for the nation, the states, and for selected urban districts. No results are produced or reported for individual students or schools. Federal law specifies severe penalties for anyone revealing the identity of the children taking NAEP. In its long history, that security has never been broken.