Students' academic success in science is widely seen by political and business leaders as key to the nation's economic rebirth and future competitiveness. President Obama has made clear his belief in the importance of scientific literacy by stating that "our nation's long-term economic prosperity depends on providing a world-class education…

Mathematics knowledge and skills serve as the "gatekeeper" to students' choice of college majors, success obtaining college degrees, and entry into the workforce. However, on the mathematics portion of standardized tests, U.S. fourth and eighth graders performed below their peers in countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and…

NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) results in mathematics and reading are based on representative samples of 1,100 to 2,300 public school students at grade 4 and 900 to 2,100 public school students at grade 8 in each participating urban district in 2013. Twenty-one urban districts participated in the 2013 assessments. The assessments…

One of the major objectives of large-scale educational surveys is reporting trends in academic achievement. For this purpose, a substantial number of items are carried from one assessment cycle to the next. The linking process that places academic abilities measured in different assessments on a common scale is usually based on a concurrent…

Beginning in summer 2009, the complete set of NAEP student assessment items for grades 4 and 8 Science and Reading 2009 assessments were analyzed for comparison to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Item Specifications which are based on the NAEP Assessment Frameworks for these subjects (National Assessment Governing Board,…

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has expended considerable effort to ensure high quality in data collection by developing standardized materials and survey operation procedures and using well-trained professional administrators. However, schools are allowed to minimize the disruption associated with pulling students out of…

This study developed a comprehensive measure of the stringency level of NCLB states' accountability systems, including the strength of their annual measurable objectives, confidence intervals, performance indexing, retesting, minimum subgroup size, and the difficulty levels of proficiency standards. This study related accountability stringency in…

Despite costly global efforts to improve and reward teacher qualifications like education and experience, little international evidence exists on the relationship between these attributes and student achievement. It is also unclear whether these attributes are more important for disadvantaged children, or in lower-income countries. This article…

In 2010, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Education Program has established the Deeper Learning Initiative, which focuses on students' development of deeper learning skills (i.e., the mastery of core academic content, critical-thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and "learn-how-to-learn" skills). Two test…

Using data from the Digest of Educational Statistics, this article argues that an intergenerational comparison is a more productive, progressive method to interpret data used to gauge the achievement gap. It applies this method by comparing the academic achievement scores and educational outcomes of African Americans over a nearly 70-year period,…

Given the changing landscape of educational accountability at the local, state, and national levels, and the changes in the uses of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), including the evolving uses of NAEP as a policy tool to interpret state assessment and accountability systems, an explicit statement of the current and potential…

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…

Little research currently examines language instruction educational programs (LIEPs) in states with a more recent growth of the Latino English learner population. To meet this need, the authors examined the content each of the state LIEPs, focusing chiefly on the extent to which the types of language support, as well as the stipulations associated…

Following a push to make "the nation's report card" better reflect the academic performance of all children in America's schools, most states boosted the numbers of students with disabilities and English-language learners who participated in the 2011 reading and math tests that are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).…

This report examines what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) can tell us about charter school enrollment and student performance compared to that of regular public schools. The study uses NAEP reading and mathematics data from 2011 and the earlier years when charter school data first became available (2003 for grade 4; 2005 for…