The NAEP 1998 Writing State Reports

September 1999

Authors: Laura J. Jerry and Nada Ballator

Browse map to select individual state reports (as PDF files) to download for viewing and printing.

Appendix A: Where to Find More Information

Below are only a few suggestions for finding additional NAEP results and related information. Many of the reports and data files on the Web will require the use of the (free) Adobe Acrobat Reader; for information on installing the Reader, click on the Help link at the NAEP Web site, http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/.

Details of the NAEP Writing Assessment

For details of the framework on which the writing assessment was developed, see Writing Framework for the National Assessment of Educational Progress: 1992-1998 (155K PDF), the companion report, the NAEP 1998 Writing Report Card for the Nation and the States. Both that report and the NAEP 1998 Writing State Reports are available on the NAEP Web site. For details of the framework on which the writing assessment was developed, see http://www.nagb.org/. Click on the Publications button on the left, and then click on Writing Framework and Specifications for the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Technical information about the assessment will be available in the NAEP 1998 Technical Report in 2000. Until that technical report is available, many questions may be answered by searching in the Technical Report of the NAEP 1996 State Assessment Program in Science, to be found at the NAEP Web site. The science assessment was also on a within-grade scale, so science scaling procedures would be more similar to writing than would the scaling procedures in the mathematics assessment (which was on a cross-grade scale).

1998 Participation Rates

Information on each jurisdiction's participation rates for schools and students is in Appendix A of the Writing Report Card to be found at the NAEP Web site.

Additional Results from the Writing Assessment

For more findings from the 1998 writing assessments, refer to the 1998 results at the NAEP Web site. On the release date, the summary data tables (SDTs) at this site will include student, school, and teacher variables for all jurisdictions, the nation, and the four NAEP geographic regions. Complete SDTs will be available for all jurisdictions, with all background questions cross-tabulated with the major demographic reporting variables (for instance, hours of television watched by level of parental education or limited English proficiency by race/ethnicity).

Variables Reported in the State Reports

The following variables can be found in the summary data tables (SDTs) at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/. More information on these variables is available in Appendix A of the Writing Report Card at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/, the NAEP Web site. The variables reported here, with their labels in the tables are:

Gender. This is DSEX in the SDTs. Reports documenting or surveying gender differences in writing include NAEP 1996 Trends in Academic Progress at the NAEP Web site, The Condition of Education, for instance The ETS Gender Study.
Race/Ethnicity. This is DRACE in the SDTs. An instructive explanation of the derivation appears in Appendix A of the Writing Report Card at the NAEP Web site.
Students' Reports of Parents' Highest Education Level. PARED2 is a derived variable also described in Appendix A of the Writing Report Card. The effect of parental education is discussed in a paper by Grissmer, Kirby, Berends, and Williamson (1994) of RAND.
Free/Reduced-Price Lunch Program Eligibility. The variable reported here is SLUNCH1, which is a version of SLUNCH with several of the categories of SLUNCH (e.g., reduced and free) combined. A description of the free/reduced-price lunch program is available at http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/Lunch/Default.htm.
Type of Location. TOL3 is the label in the SDTs. The TOL variable uses data from the most recent Quality Education Data (QED) file (see http://www.qeddata.com/) combined with the most recent Private School Survey (PSS) file (see http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/). The Common Core of Data (CCD) file (see http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/index.html) is used to extract type of location or urbanization information where missing from the QED file. Through this process, the TOL variable reflects the type of location values for the school recorded on the 1995/96 CCD and PSS files. Schools with missing values for type of location were assigned the TOL of other schools within the same city, when TOL did not vary within that city. Any remaining missing TOL values were assigned using U.S. Bureau of Census publications. Additional information is available in Chapter 3, Section 4, of the Technical Report of the NAEP 1996 State Assessment Program in Mathematics.
Type of School. SCHTYPE is the label in the SDTs. Note that the Nonpublic school sample includes Private and Catholic school students. BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) and DoDEA (Department of Defense Education Activity) students are in the Combined sample only.

Publications from NAEP Writing Assessments

NAEP also offers various special reports on writing that may be of particular interest to teachers. These may be ordered from the source at the end of this section, and some of them can be accessed and printed from the Web.

Writing Framework and Specifications for the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress, from the National Assessment Governing Board (available at http://www.nagb.org/)
NAEP 1998 Writing Report Card for the Nation and the States, the companion to this State Report (available at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/, the NAEP Web site)
The NAEP 1998 Writing Report Card Highlights, a brochure with student samples, covering the national and state NAEP 1998 writing assessment (available at the NAEP Web site)
NAEP 1999 Trends in Academic Progress, containing samples of student writing from the NAEP Long-Term Trend assessment (forthcoming at the NAEP Web site)
NAEP 1996 Trends in Writing: Fluency and Writing Conventions, a short report from the NAEP Long-Term Trend assessment (available at the NAEP Web site)
NAEPFacts: Can Students Benefit from Process Writing? To read this short publication describing selected results from the 1992 Writing Report Card, click on the report title, or go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/ and enter 96845 in the box labeled "Enter NCES #."

Some special reports on reading may be of interest to language arts teachers:

Listening to Children Read Aloud, Data from NAEP's Integrated Reading Performance Record (IRPR) at Grade 4, results from the 1992 IRPR, a special study conducted with a subgroup of fourth graders who participated in the 1992 NAEP reading assessment (available in print only)
Interviewing Children About their Literacy Experiences, Data from NAEP's Integrated Reading Performance Record (IRPR) at Grade 4, results from the 1992 IRPR, a special study conducted with a subgroup of fourth graders who participated in the 1992 NAEP reading assessment (available in print only)
NAEPFacts: Listening to Children Read Aloud: Oral Fluency To read this NAEPFacts, summarizing NAEP's first attempt to measure 4th graders' oral reading fluency, accuracy, and rate on a large-scale basis, click on the report title, or go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/ and enter 95762 in the box labeled "Enter NCES #."
Students Selecting Stories: The Effects of Choice in Reading Assessment, results from the NAEP Reader Special Survey of the 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress (available at the NAEP Web site). To see this publication, click on the report title, or go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/ and enter 97491 in the box labeled "Enter NCES #."

For ordering information on these reports, write:

U.S. Department of Education
ED Pubs
P.O. Box 1398
Jessup, MD 20794-1398
or call toll free 1-877-4 ED PUBS (1-877-433-7827)

NAEP reports in addition to those listed above are available at the NAEP Web site. Click on the "PUBLICATIONS" link to get a list of NAEP-related NCES publications and data products. (Alternatively, you may go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/, enter the NCES publication number, or enter key words from the title or author information in the "Enter searchword(s)" box, and/or select National Assessment of Educational Progress in the "Additional search options" box.) For many of the publications, a free copy may be ordered on line. Click on the title of a publication in which you are interested. If printed copies are available, the next page will have a link to "Order Your Free Copy Now From EdPubs".

Sample NAEP Questions for Classroom Use

All of the released items from the 1998 writing assessment are available in the Writing Report Card, and on the NAEP Web site. The NAEP Questions Tool presents questions, scoring guides, actual responses, and scores from released portions of NAEP assessments. To access this tool from the NAEP Web site, click on "SAMPLE QUESTIONS." There is a tutorial for first time users.

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Browse map to select individual state reports (as PDF files) to download for viewing and printing.

Last updated 12 April 2004 (CC)