In 1982, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) proposed to implement a new, complex design for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The major features of this design are described in "A New Design for a New Era" (Messick, Beaton, and Lord, 1983). The purpose of this document is to describe the actual implementation of the design in the 1983-84 National Assessment of Reading and Writing (NAEP's fifteenth year); it is intended as a supplement to the reports of that assessment (see ED 264 550, ED 273 680, ED 273 994) and supports these reports by providing detailed technical information so that the accuracy of the substantive results can be judged. Some major features of the new design were: to sample grades 4, 8, and 11 as well as students' ages 9, 13, and 17 (in school); to introduce Balanced Incomplete Block (BIB) spiralling as a method of estimating inter-relationships among variables; to collect extensive information about teachers, principals, and schools; and to scale the reading data, if possible. These innovations were added to the previously used procedures, which were kept to ensure maintenance of NAEP trends. This report describes: (1) the data collection processes, including the assessment instruments for reading and writing; (2) the data analysis process for both reading and writing, including "plausible values" of reading proficiency and the NAEP reading and writing; and (3) some estimates of the reading and writing proficiencies of selected subpopulations of the sampled students. Two supplementary studies on the validity of NAEP's reading and writing assessment instruments and the design effects in the 1983-84 sample are also presented. A glossary of terms and a 124-item reference list complete the document. (JGL)