The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what students in the United States know and can do in various academic subjects. The 1996 NAEP in mathematics assessed the current level of mathematical achievement as a mechanism for informing education reform. In 1996, 44 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and the Department of Defense schools took part in the NAEP state mathematics assessment program. The NAEP 1996 state mathematics assessment was at grade 4 and grade 8, although grades 4, 8, and 12 were assessed at the national level. The 1996 state mathematics assessment covered the five content strands: (1) Number Sense, Properties, and Operations; (2) Measurement; (3) Geometry and Spatial Sense; (4) Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability; and (5) Algebra and Functions. In the District of Columbia, 2,574 students in 108 public schools were assessed at the fourth-grade level and 1,693 students in 32 public schools were assessed at the eighth-grade level. This report describes the mathematics proficiency of the District of Columbia fourth- and eighth-graders, compares their overall performance to students in the Northeast region of the United States and the entire United States (using data from the NAEP national assessment), presents the average proficiency for the five content strands, and summarizes the performance of subpopulations (gender, race/ethnicity, parents' educational level, Title I participation, and free/reduced lunch program eligibility). To provide a context for the assessment data, participating students, their mathematics teachers, and principals completed questionnaires which focused on: school characteristics (attendance); instructional content (curriculum coverage, standards, amount of homework); delivery of mathematics instruction and its characteristics; use of technology in mathematics instruction; students' own views about mathematics; and conditions facilitating mathematics learning (hours of television watched, parental support, home influences). On the NAEP fields of mathematics scales that range from 0 to 500, the average mathematics scale score for fourth grade students in the District of Columbia was 187 compared to 222 throughout the United States and the average mathematics scale score for eighth grade students in the District of Columbia was 233 compared to 271 throughout the United States. The average mathematics scale score of fourth and eighth grade males did not differ significantly from that of females in either the District of Columbia or the nation. At the fourth and eighth grades, White students in the District of Columbia had an average mathematics scale score that was higher than that of Black and Hispanic students. (ASK)