The following resources provide general information related to the history, background, and administration of the NAEP assessment.
NAEP Glossary
Schedule for State and National NAEP Assessments
Histories of NAEP
History of NAEP Partners
Assessment Field Manuals
NAEP Year-at-a-Glance
NAEP Linking Studies
An Overview of Procedures for the NAEP Assessment
Use the NAEP Glossary as a reference for any unfamiliar NAEP terms. Note that more detailed descriptions of NAEP procedures can be found in the technical documentation, with references
See the schedule for all NAEP assessments, from the first assessments in 1969 through those scheduled in 2017. Schedules for main NAEP, state, TUDA, and long-term trend are included.
A detailed history of NAEP, including the challenges faced since its beginnings—from the institution of voluntary state assessments to federally funded NAEP coordinators in each state—was released in April 2004 to coincide with NAEP's 40th anniversary: The Nation's Report Card: Evolution and Perspectives.
Read highlights of NAEP history, from its very beginning in 1964. Also read the abstract of a history of NAEP by Lyle V. Jones, and see instructions for obtaining a full copy of this article, originally published in Educational Researcher, Vol. 25, No. 7, pp.15-22, October 1996.
A history of the National Assessment Governing Board was published in 1998; Overseeing the Nation's Report Card (1035K PDF). Other retrospective reports were published in 2009 on the twentieth anniversary of the Governing Board.
NAEP is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) through contracts awarded for many parts of the assessment process, including: design, analysis, and reporting; item development; data collection; and scoring. Learn how NAEP has grown and changed in many ways since the first assessment in 1969-1970. Also, see who the current NAEP partners are.
These assessment manuals provide detailed information for NAEP administrators, describing their role in NAEP and their responsibilities in administering the assessment.
These brochures include major NAEP events, publications released, tallies of students tested, and sample test items scored in the assessments. They are in PDF files varying in size from 217KB to 2,382KB.
In recent years, there has been considerable interest among education policymakers and researchers in linking NAEP results to other assessment data. Linking allows researchers to predict from students’ performance on one assessment how they might perform on another assessment they did not take. The 1992 NAEP mathematics assessment results were successfully linked with the International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP) of 1991, and the 1996, 2000, and 2003 grade 8 NAEP assessments in mathematics and science have been less successfully linked to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) of 1995, 1999, and 2003. Various methods for linking NAEP scores to state assessment results continue to be explored. Also being explored are methods to enhance the value of NAEP data by linking to other national databases, such as the Common Core of Data and the School and Staffing Survey. For more detail, see Question 14 in An Overview of Procedures for the NAEP Assessment (600KB PDF).
An Overview of Procedures for the NAEP Assessment (600KB PDF) provides readers with an overview of the project, to help them better understand the philosophical approach, procedures, analyses, and psychometric underpinnings of NAEP. The guide follows a question-and-answer format, with a succinct answer followed by more detail. A bibliography, glossary, and index are included.
