Becoming a More Inclusive NAEP
NAEP has always endeavored to assess all students selected as a part of its sampling process, including students with disabilities (SD) and/or students who are classified by their schools as limited English proficient (LEP). The decision to exclude special-needs students is made by school personnel, who, using NAEP guidelines, decide whether students can meaningfully be assessed without accommodations. According to the guidelines, students with IEPs are to be included in the NAEP assessment except in the following cases:
All LEP students receiving academic instruction in English for three years or more are to be included in assessments. Those LEP students receiving instruction in English for fewer than three years are to be included unless school staff judge them to be incapable of participating in the assessment in English. In order to become a more inclusive program and to remain consistent with testing practices in most states and districts, the NAEP geography assessment explored the possibility of offering accommodations to special-needs students who required them during the 2001 assessment. At the same time, NAEP wanted to be able to compare 2001 results with those from the 1994 geography assessment. In 2001, the geography assessment national sample was divided into two subsamples to study both accommodated and non-accommodated populations. In one subsample, no accommodations were permitted; all students were tested under the same conditions that were the basis for reporting results from previous assessments. In the other, accommodations were permitted for special-needs students who normally receive accommodations in their district or state testing program. Most of the accommodations provided to special-needs students in other state and district testing programs were permitted in the NAEP geography assessment unless the accommodation altered the construct being tested. This split-sample design made it possible to report national trends in student geography performance since 1994 and, at the same time, examine overall student performance when special-needs students who require and receive testing accommodations are included. As a consequence of the split-sample design, two different sets of results are available:
View more information about the percentages of students excluded and assessed in both samples: Find out about the percentage of students receiving each type of accommodation in the 2001 national sample. Return to main results.
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