NAEP Technical DocumentationProcessing Schedule and Overall Counts for the 2016 Assessment

2016 Student Participation and Session Information 2015 Student Participation and Session Information

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted the 2016 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) with staff from several organizations under the umbrella of the NAEP Alliance. Item development, sample design, materials processing, data analysis, and program staff are responsible for: 

• alliance coordination, item development, and design, analysis, and reporting;
• sampling and data collection as well as the NAEP State Service Center;
• web technology, design, operation, and maintenance;
• maintenance of a master schedule and earned value reporting; and
• materials preparation, distribution, processing, and scoring.

The NAEP 2016 assessment was comprised of the following student assessments:

• Arts (music and visual arts) at grade 8, paper-based
• Integrated math pilot at grade 4 and grade 8, digitally based
• Integrated reading pilot at grade 4 and grade 8, digitally based
• Writing pilot at grade 8, digitally based
• Mathematics proof of concept at grade 4 and grade 8 in Puerto Rico, digitally based

Materials processing and scoring staff were responsible for the following tasks in the NAEP 2016 assessment:

• printing test booklets and questionnaires;
• packaging and distributing materials;
• receipt control;
• data capture through image and optical mark recognition scanning;
• data editing and validation;
• upload of open-ended responses into NAEP's electronic scoring system, including scanned images from paper booklets and digital responses completed on tablets;
• creation of training sets for new items;
• training and performance scoring of constructed-response items;
• quality control;
• data file creation; and
• inventory control and materials storage.

For NAEP 2016, a total of 16 types of scannable student booklets was designed and printed, along with the non-scannable large-print and braille student booklets used in the arts assessment. 

School and teacher questionnaires were offered online through a secure FTP site. Scannable questionnaires were provided to respondents upon request. This site was available December 4, 2015 through March 17, 2016. 

Approximately, 8,690 questionnaires were entered online and 470 scannable questionnaires were completed for the arts assessment, digitally based pilot, and Puerto Rico proof of concept assessments. 

There were approximately 8,700 students assessed in the arts and 26,900 students assessed in integrated mathematics, integrated reading, and writing pilot, and 860 students assessed in mathematics in Puerto Rico in NAEP 2016.

Scoring of NAEP 2016 occurred in Iowa City, IA for the writing pilot and arts; Norfolk, VA for integrated reading pilot; and Mesa, AZ for the integrated mathematics pilot.  As in past cycles, project and content specialists were on site to monitor scoring. There was daily communication between staff at the scoring sites and project staff in the District of Columbia; Iowa City, IA; and Princeton, NJ. Reports were available to a variety of staff from NCES, the NAEP program, and organizations within the Alliance. Reports included the Trend Reliability and Mean Comparison (TRMC) Report, which highlighted items that were in need of more discussion, and the Completion Report, which showed detailed scoring information for each item, as well as cumulative current and historical monitoring statistics for both trend and non-trend items. More than 791,000 responses were scored from 473 items. All of NAEP 2016 was scored during June 13th through July 2nd, 2016.

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