Peggy G. Carr, Ph.D.
Acting Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics

Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: Results from the 2013 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments
July 9, 2015

For more than a decade, stakeholders in U.S. education have been asking important questions about what it means to be proficient academically. How does our state assessment measure up to other state assessments? Are my state’s expectations of proficiency different from those in other states, or from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)? The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) set out to answer those questions for all 50 states and the District of Columbia in its latest study—Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales: Results from the 2013 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments.

This study uses NAEP as a common metric to compare across the many assessments used by the states in measuring their students’ proficiency in mathematics and reading at grades 4 and 8. The report provides a NAEP scale equivalent score for each state that corresponds to the percentage of students who scored at or above the proficiency cut point on their state assessment. With these scores, we are able to see where states’ proficiency cut points lie on the NAEP scale and how states’ proficiency cut points compare with each other

The study focuses on results for the 2012-13 school year. It does not reflect changes states may have made to their proficiency standards after 2013.

Key Findings

• In fourth-grade reading, 26 states had proficiency standards that were below the NAEP Basic cut point, 23 states were within the Basic range, and 2 were in the Proficient range.
• In grade 4 mathematics, 4 states had proficiency standards that were below Basic, 42 were in the Basic range, and 5 states were in the Proficient range.
• In grade 8 reading, 10 state standards were below NAEP’s Basic cut point, while 40 were in the Basic range. Only one state—New York—was in the Proficient range.
• In grade 8 mathematics, 8 states had state proficiency standards that were below NAEP’s Basic range, 38 states were in the Basic range, and 3 states—North Carolina, Texas, and New York—had a standard that was in the Proficient range.
• States with standards in the NAEP Proficient range for at least one subject included Massachusetts (grade 4 reading), New York (grades 4 and 8 mathematics and reading), North Carolina (grades 4 and 8 mathematics), Texas (grades 4 and 8 mathematics), and Wisconsin (grade 4 reading and mathematics).
• New York was the only state to have standards in the NAEP Proficient range in all four grade/subject combinations.
• Alabama, Georgia, and Idaho were the only states with standards below the NAEP Basic range in all four grade/subject combinations.

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