R&D Hub

The NAEP R&D team is ringing in the new year by sharing a new journal article from NAEP researchers that will serve as a useful resource for those looking to learn more about analyzing NCES datasets like NAEP’s. NAEP researchers Ting Zhang, Paul Bailey, and Yuqi Liao, along with acting chief of NCES's Reporting and Dissemination branch Emmanuel Sikali, recently published their article “EdSurvey: An R package to analyze large-scale educational assessments data from NCES” in Large-scale Assessments in Education.

The NAEP research community was hard at work in 2024 exploring new ways to deepen our understanding of student academic achievement and assessment in the United States. We here at the NAEP R&D Hub have shared it all along the way, highlighting the work of innovative researchers (especially in emergent fields such as AI), disseminating news about new and improved tools for researchers, and bringing awareness to relevant conference opportunities and presentations. As we enjoy the holiday season and look forward to a new year and new NAEP internship opportunities, we’d like to look back on some of the NAEP R&D Hub highlights of 2024.

EdSurvey 4.0.7 was recently released and is now available on CRAN-R. This update enables EdSurvey to support the analysis of main NAEP data up to 2022, NAEP long-term trend data up to 2023, the 2022 Monthly School Survey (MSS) Linking Study, and the 2021 School and Teacher Questionnaire Special Study. In addition, the package now supports two international large-scale assessments: PISA 2022 and ICILS 2023. A new rounding feature has also been introduced to facilitate rounding results according to NCES statistical standards or user-defined criteria. For details, users can refer to “?es_round” within package 4.0.7. For more information on minor changes and bug fixes in this update, visit the EdSurvey news page on CRAN-R.  

Paul Bailey and Blue Webb, members of the EdSurvey team, recently published an article, “Expanding NAEP and TIMSS Analysis to Include Additional Variables or a New Scoring Model Using the R Package Dire.” Featured in the journal Psych in its special issue on computational psychometrics, this article showcases the new Dire software and its utility for ushering in a new era of data use at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The NAEP R&D Program stayed busy in 2022, making strides on a wide variety of fronts. As the year comes to a close, let’s look back at some of the progress and achievements made in 2022.