The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) continuously monitors the knowledge, skills, and performance of U.S. children and youth in a variety of academic subjects. The data collected are available in a series of major reports. The NAEP Facts series takes selected data from these reports and uses them to highlight specific issues of particular interest to teachers, researchers, policymakers, and other individuals with an interest in education. This concise report highlights long-term trends in student writing performance. The report's first section discusses results from the NAEP 1996 Long-Term Trend Writing Assessment. The results show a decline in scores for grade 11 students over the period 1984-1996, while scores for students in grades 4 and 8 remained unchanged. The second section discusses the analysis of long-term trend data. The third section deals with overall performance; while the fourth section addresses race/ethnicity and gender, showing that, as in the past, white students outperformed black and Hispanic students in writing in all three grades, and that, as in the past, female students outperformed male students for all three grades. The report points out that student writing performance remained largely unchanged from 1984 to 1996, except for the decline in scores noted for 11th grade students. It notes that recent research indicates that the use of computers in schools for instructional purposes may reduce student writing performance on paper-and-pencil writing assessments like this one. One figure and one table of data are included. (SR)