"Encouraging trends in student achievement" were reported today by Gary W. Phillips, Acting Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Dr. Phillips stated that "the most consistent and steady gains were in mathematics and advanced course taking in mathematics and science." These results are from a new trend report, NAEP 1999 Trends in Academic Progress, that examines the academic performance of 9-, 13-, and 17-year olds. Data show that for mathematics, since 1973, students in all age groups assessed achieved consistent gains. These increases began in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s.

NAEP 1999 Trends in Academic Progress also describes student performance since the early 1970s in reading and science. Reading scores have also improved, but showed less improvement than mathematics scores.  Nine and 13-year-olds are reading better than they did nearly 30 years ago. However, scores for 17-year-olds remained unchanged.

Student performance in science has varied by age group.  Scores for 9-year-olds were higher in 1999 than in 1970, while scores for 13-year-olds remained unchanged.  For 17-year-olds, scores were lower in 1999 than in the first assessment, administered in 1969.  Actually, the science scores for this group decreased between 1969 and 1982, before they started increasing. While this age group's science scores have not returned to their initial level, there is an emerging trend of 17-year-olds taking more advanced science courses.

The report also provides data related to the nation's ongoing concerns about the educational gap between minorities and whites. While scores for whites have consistently been higher than for blacks and Hispanics for all three ages in all three subjects, some gaps have narrowed for some age groups in all three subjects since the early 1970s. For example, in mathematics, the score gap between black and white students narrowed for all three age groups.

The report also describes performance by gender.  In reading, females continued to outperform males in all three age groups.  In mathematics, males had outperformed females at age 17 in previous long-term trend assessments, but in 1999 this gap disappeared, resulting in similar performance for males and females for all three age groups. In science, males outperformed females at ages 13 and 17, but not at age 9.  The science gap favoring 17-year-old males has declined since the first assessment in 1969.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is administered by NCES, an agency within the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement. NAEP has administered 10 long-term trend assessments for reading, 10 for science, and 9 for mathematics over the past 30 years. In 1999, approximately 16,000 students took each of the three assessments.

For further information on the NAEP 1999 Trends in Academic Progress, please visit NCES's NAEP Web site at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard.  For a full transcript of an online chat about this report please visit http://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/statchat. All NAEP reports can be ordered by calling toll free 1-877-4ED-Pubs (1-877-433-7827), TTY/TTD 1-877-576-7734; e-mailing at edpubs@edpubs.ed.gov; or via the Internet at http://edpubs.ed.gov.