It is a much-lamented fact that research with the potential to inform or influence education policy instead remains policy inert. There are many reasons for this frustrating state of affairs, including a lack of strategic thinking on the part of researchers on how to successfully accomplish outreach--as opposed to communication with peers…

Background: Economists are making increasing use of measures of student achievement obtained through large-scale survey assessments such as NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA. The construction of these measures, employing plausible value (PV) methodology, is quite different from that of the more familiar test scores associated with assessments such as the SAT…

Background/context: The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only comparative assessment of academic competencies regularly administered to nationally representative samples of students enrolled in Grades 4, 8, and 12. Because NAEP is a low-stakes assessment, there are long-standing questions about the level of engagement and…

This article investigates plausible explanations for the observed heterogeneity among jurisdictions in the exclusion rates of students with disabilities and English language learners in administrations of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It also examines the operating characteristics of a particular class of methods, called…

The science achievement of U.S. students has been flat for a decade; in fact, in a recent international assessment, U.S. students ranked lower, on average, than their peers in 16 of 30 developed nations. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in addition to serving as the nation's report card, collects information from students,…

At present, although the percentages of students with disabilities (SDs) and/or students who are English language learners (ELL) excluded from a NAEP administration are reported, no statistical adjustment is made for these excluded students in the calculation of NAEP results. However, the exclusion rates for both SD and ELL students vary…

This report describes the derivation and evaluation of a method for comparing the performance standards for public school students set by different states. It is based on an approach proposed by McLaughlin and associates, which constituted an innovative attempt to resolve the confusion and concern that occurs when very different proportions of…

Data collected by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has consistently shown public school students performing more poorly than those in private schools. But when a more sophisticated assessment model was applied to recent NAEP data for students in grades 4 and 8, the achievement gap narrowed considerably and reversed for…

The goal of the study was to examine differences in mean National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics scores between public and private schools when selected characteristics of students and/or schools were taken into account. Among the student characteristics considered were gender, race/ethnicity, disability status,…

Over the last fifteen years, many states have implemented high-stakes tests as part of an effort to strengthen accountability for schools, teachers, and students. Predictably, there has been vigorous disagreement regarding the contributions of such policies to increasing test scores and, more importantly, to improving student learning. A recent…