NAEP Technical DocumentationSampling Frame for the 2018 Public School Social Sciences Assessment

			New-School Sampling Frame

Drawing the school samples for the 2018 assessment required a comprehensive list of public schools in each jurisdiction containing information for stratification purposes. As in previous NAEP assessments, the Common Core of Data (CCD) file developed by NCES was used to construct the sampling frame. The CCD file corresponding to the 2015-2016 school year provided the frame for all regular public, state-operated public, Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), and Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) schools in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The sampling frame was restricted to schools located in the primary sampling units (PSUs) selected for the NAEP 2018 social sciences assessment. In addition, the sampling frame excluded ungraded schools, vocational schools with no enrollment, special-education-only schools, homeschool entities, prison or hospital schools, and juvenile correctional institutions. Vocational schools with no enrollment serve students who split their time between the vocational school and their home school.

The public school frame for the social sciences assessment contained approximately 13,200 schools. The estimated eighth-grade enrollment (unweighted) for these schools was 2.15 million and the estimated eighth-grade enrollment (weighted) was 3.71 million. The unweighted estimated enrollment is restricted to the selected PSUs for social sciences. The weighted estimated enrollment incorporates the PSU weight (inverse of the probability of selecting the PSU), and thus is a national estimate of the number of public school students in eighth grade.

For quality control purposes, school and student counts from the sampling frame were compared to school and student counts from previous public school frames for eighth grade. No major discrepancies were found.

Printer-friendly Version