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NAEP Sample Design → Sample Design for the 2000 Assessment → National Main Assessment Sample Design in 2000 → Sampling Frame for the 2000 National Main Assessment

NAEP Technical DocumentationSampling Frame for the 2000 National Main Assessment

			Selection of New Public Schools School Substitution for Adjusting School Nonresponse Number of Schools by Frame Source

The public school frame was constructed upon three sources:

• The primary source was the 1997–98 NCES Common Core of Data (CCD) Public Elementary and Secondary School Universe file.

• The secondary source was the Quality Education Data (QED) file, from which school location addresses were obtained. QED was also used to compile a list of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools and Department of Defense Domestic Dependent Elementary and Secondary Schools (DDESS). The coverage of BIA schools on CCD was incomplete, and it was preferable to simply drop all such records and replace them with QED data. CCD offered no coverage of DDESS schools.

• The third source was the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) website, which further refined the list of DDESS schools.

The NAEP private school frame was based on the 1997–98 Private School Survey (PSS) frame developed by the Census Bureau for NCES. PSS is a biennial mail survey of all private schools in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The 1997–98 PSS frame of schools comprises a list frame and an area frame. The list frame is a conglomeration of the 1995–96 PSS frame and more up to date lists from state education agencies, private school associations, and other easily accessible sources. To improve the coverage of the PSS list frame, the Census Bureau conducted a more labor-intensive search for private schools in a random sample of areas throughout the United States, which were single counties or groups of counties sampled from an area frame constructed from all counties in the Nation. A complete list of private schools within each area was gathered using information from phone books, religious institutions, local education agencies, Chambers of Commerce and local government offices. Schools not already on the list frame were identified and added. The probabilities of selection for schools on the PSS file ranged from 0.02 to 1.00. A weight component was computed so that area frame schools represent all schools absent from the list frame, not just those in the selected areas.

Number of schools in the original sample, by school type and grade, national main assessment: 2000

Grade	Total	Public	Private	New (public)
4	1,400	570	820	<5
8	1,200	480	720	<5
12	940	320	620	<5
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2000.

School Frame Information

Only regular schools offering grades 4, 8, or 12, including charter schools and statewide magnet schools, were eligible for inclusion in the NAEP frame. Regular schools are schools with students who are classified as being in a specific grade (as opposed to schools having only "ungraded" classrooms). Strictly ungraded schools, special education, prison and hospital schools, and vocational schools whose students were officially enrolled somewhere else were all purged from the frame. The numbers of schools included in the various sampling frame components are provided on the web page titled Number of Schools by Frame Source. An independent sample of schools was selected for each of the grades. The population of eligible schools was restricted to the 94 PSUs selected for NAEP for all but the grade 8 public school sample. Estimates were made of the number of students who were eligible based on grade enrollment for each school in the frame. The CCD, QED, and PSS files give total enrollment and the grade range for each school and provide the means to calculate the average per grade enrollment. Any school not reporting total enrollment had the average per grade enrollment imputed as 20. For public schools, the average per grade enrollment was used as the estimated number of eligibles for whichever of grades 4, 8, and 12 were offered by the school. For private schools, the actual grade 4, 8, and 12 enrollment reported to PSS was used, unless the number reported was zero. Under that circumstance, if the grade was offered, the average per grade enrollment was used.

A school was assumed to offer a particular grade if the grade fell within the grade range, even if the enrollment reported for that specific grade was zero. However, any private school terminating in grade 11 was assumed also to offer grade 12. Private schools not responding to the PSS were assumed to offer all of grades 4, 8, and 12 to avoid bias. A school appeared in the frame for a particular grade without regard to its eligibility status for either of the two other designated grades, so there is considerable overlap among the three grade-level frames.

There is considerable overlap among the three grade-level frames because schools could (and did) appear on more than one frame.

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