The National Indian Education Study: Accessing More Results

The National Indian Education Study (NIES) 2019 report, released this past May, contained data focused primarily on two guiding questions:

1. To what extent are American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) culture and language part of the curricula?
2. What is the overall education context for AI/AN students in the United States?

Only so much data could fit in this report. An enormous amount of additional data is publicly available via the NIES Data Explorer—also known as the NIES NDE. The NIES NDE gives the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results for AI/AN students on grades 4 and 8 mathematics and reading assessments dating back to 2005, the first year of the study. Results are also available for the NIES survey that explored the educational experiences of participating students, their teachers, and their school administrators.

NIES Data Explorer Capabilities

The NDE allows users to define their criteria, view tables, run statistical tests, and create charts. You can save, copy, and export the results and share them with others.

The ability to disaggregate NIES data allows users to focus on an area of interest, one that might not have been covered in the 2019 NIES report. For example, the table below shows data from a survey question that asked fourth-grade students: How do you rate yourself in speaking an American Indian or Alaska Native Language?

Percentages for grade 4, by Rating in speaking AI/AN language [IB20301] and jurisdiction: 2019

If you want to see if a selected data point is statistically different from another one, you may add significance results either within the table by selecting ‘ADD SIGNIFICANCE TEST’ or separately by choosing the ‘Create Significance Test’ option.

This will show that for the question above (focusing on the comparison of Atlantic AI/AN students to AI/AN students nationwide):

• a significantly higher percentage (53%) of Atlantic AI/AN students answered the response option “I cannot speak an American Indian or Alaska Native language” compared to AI/AN students nationwide (44%);
• a significantly lower percentage (26%) of Atlantic AI/AN students answered the option “I can speak a few words or phrases” compared to AI/AN students nationwide (40%);
• and there was not a statistically significant difference between the percentage (21%) of Atlantic AI/AN students that answered “I can speak well” compared to AI/AN students nationwide (16%).

Another feature in the NDE is cross-tabulation, which combines separate variables into a single table. For example, if you want to look at female, AI/AN students, or AI/AN eligible for the National School Lunch Program, users can select up to three variables (other than the variable All students) for each crosstab they would like to create.

In addition to the NIES Data Explorer, there are three other data explorers: The Main NAEP NDE, Long Term Trend (LTT) NDE, and High School Transcript NDE. The overall layout of all the four data explorers is very similar. Once users have experience in one data explorer, they will be well equipped to use the other three.