NAEP Technical DocumentationSelection of New Public Schools for the 2001 National Main Assessment

The Common Core of Data (CCD) files do not contain schools that opened between 1998 and the assessment dates. Therefore, special procedures were implemented to ensure that the 2001 NAEP assessment represented students in new public schools. (This was not done for private schools because—with the exception of Catholic schools—their district structure is not uniform. Catholic schools were in fact included for the first time in the new-school procedure in 2003.) Small school districts, those containing only one eligible school for a given grade, were handled differently from large school districts, which contained more than one eligible school for a given grade. In small school districts, the schools selected for a given grade were thought to contain all students in the district that were eligible for the assessment. Districts containing these schools were asked if other schools with the appropriate grades for the assessment existed, and if so, they were automatically included in the assessment.

For large school districts, a district-level frame was constructed from the schools on the CCD file. Districts were then sampled systematically with probabilities proportional to a measure of size. In most cases, the measure of size was total district enrollment, but in very small districts, a minimum measure of size was used. Each sampled district was asked to update the list of eligible schools derived from information on the CCD files. Frames of eligible new schools were then constructed at each grade, and samples of new schools were selected systematically with probability proportional to eligible enrollment using the same sampling rates as for the CCD schools. As a result of this process, one new school was selected in grade 12, and one school newly eligible for grade 8 was selected in that grade.

Last updated 08 May 2008 (MH)

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