NAEP Technical Documentation Preliminary Activities to Scoring

Once a year NCES holds a scoring debriefing and planning meeting in Washington, DC to review the previous assessment scoring and to plan for the upcoming assessment scoring. Subject area specialists review a sample of papers for all new constructed-response items. Scoring staff print images of student responses. Across all subjects, 200 sample responses are provided for each NAEP item.

These sample responses are used for the selection of anchor papers, practice sets, and qualifying sets, and to assemble consensus sets (additional practice sets only for the Writing assessment). The training set samples are reviewed during standing committee meetings (a standing committee is composed of educators, subject matter experts, and curriculum specialists who oversee the development of an assessment) prior to scoring and are used to further refine final scoring guides prior to NAEP training and scoring.

Item-level schedules are developed collaboratively by item developers and subject area coordinators. The schedules are flexible and include: 

• the estimated amount of time needed for scoring,
• the sequence of items within age or grade level, and
• the expected team and trainer assignments.

The item-level scoring schedules for the operational subjects to be scored are developed at a meeting several months prior to the administration and scoring of the assessment. Historical data for scoring speed and perceived difficulty of items and scoring are used to develop the item-level schedules. The number of scoring staff and scoring locations needed are estimated at this time, subject to revision as actual scoring nears. When possible, the schedule is made with open days to accommodate potential rescoring.

The following table provides information about the scoring activities of NAEP assessments.

The following table provides information about scoring of NAEP's long-term trend assessments. 

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