NAEP Data in Focus: Examining the Research

Using data from the 2018 NAEP grade 8 civics assessment, this study investigates disparities in access to civics content and effective instructional approaches, highlighting disparities along a range of dimensions including student, school, and state characteristics. The findings conflict with most of the prior evidence regarding disparities, showing higher reported access for Black students, Hispanic students, and students of relatively lower socio-economic background.

This paper presents the results of a study that linked scale scores from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to compare grade 8 performance in science and mathematics in the United States and TIMSS countries, using the NAEP Proficient standard as the measure.

The AIR National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) research team has conducted four studies focused on relating student motivational variables to NAEP achievement in reading, mathematics, and science across different grade levels in three of the studies and exploring its relationship to students' choice of a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major in college in the fourth study. The current summary report provides a synthesis of these four NAEP studies focused on motivation.

Using 2015 grade 8 NAEP science data, this study aims to understand the role that science motivation plays in middle school science achievement using a hierarchical linear modeling approach. The results indicated that both science self-efficacy and science interest as measures of science motivation were significant positive predictors of science achievement after controlling for student background and other variables with self-efficacy having the larger effect of the two.

This study extended an earlier investigation of college preparedness based on NAEP grade 12 mathematics data from the prediction of college enrollment alone to the prediction of additional postsecondary outcomes, including remedial course-taking and first-year college GPA based on postsecondary transcript data. The report shows the probability of college preparedness (under various definitions) at each NAEP achievement level, thereby also providing important validity information for these NAEP achievement levels.

In this report AIR proposes an SES index for NAEP comprised of four existing NAEP variables. The results show that the NAEP SES index performs better than the current proxy-NSLP eligibility-in explaining performance variation and racial/ethnic score gaps in NAEP, as well as performing better than similar SES indices in other large-scale surveys administered in the United States. In addition, the index functions similarly for each major racial/ethnic subgroup.

By utilizing two nationally representative datasets (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 [ECLS-K:2011] and NAEP 2015 grade 4 reading assessment data), this study (a) examined the unique development patterns of early reading skills, (b) identified the reading skill profiles of students who are struggling or at-risk for reading difficulties in fourth grade, and (c) examined the relationship between early reading development patterns and NAEP grade 4 reading performance.