R&D Hub

Through its Focus on NAEP website, the Nation's Report Card provides non-technical audiences a closer look at how the NAEP assessment works. In turn, stakeholders outside of the research community can have a better understanding of why this assessment matters. In this week’s post we look at how researchers can benefit from exploring this useful tool.

As discussed in the “NAEP R&D 2021 Year in Retrospect,” the EdSurvey program made big strides in 2021, including joining the official NAEP Database Products and the NAEP Data Companion and releasing updated packages with data from NHES, SOCCS, TIMSS 2019, OECD PISA 2018 Financial Literacy, and 2017 US PIACC. In 2022 and beyond, the EdSurvey program will continue to enhance usability and accessibility of NCES and international large-scale assessment data.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) began to transition to digitally based assessments (DBAs) in 2017. DBAs enable the collection of data on students’ interactions with the assessment. However, these data are not trivial to analyze, given their time-dependent nature, abundance, structural complexity, and inevitable errors in collection. For the full potential of process data to be realized, researchers must possess analytical skills that go beyond traditional statistical analysis. In the upcoming 2022 NCME conference, researchers from American Institutes for Research (AIR) , under the guidance of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), will conduct a training session using methods taken from business process mining and graph theory to advance the use of NAEP process data.

2021 saw work featured by the NAEP R&D Program make noteworthy progress and impacts on multiple fronts. As we end this year, let’s take a look at some of those achievements.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Engagement Study was a collaboration between ACT, American Institutes for Research (AIR), National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and Educational Testing Service (ETS) under the NAEP R&D Cooperative Agreements to explore the use of engagement enhancing features to improve engagement with, and strengthen the validity of, the NAEP Assessment. The following post was written by Kristin Stoeffler, ACT Project Director, Assessment Design and Cognitive Lab Lead.