R&D Hub

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.

In October 2024, the NAEP Validity Studies (NVS) panel published An Exploration of Opportunity to Learn and Implications for NAEP, a white paper co-authored by Sheila W. Valencia, James W. Pellegrino, and Richard P. Durán. The white paper explores the relationship between opportunities to learn and the interpretation of NAEP results as well as how the concept and indicators of opportunities to learn could be expanded upon to include more recent thinking around social contexts for learning in the classroom.

This holiday season, our NAEP R&D community has the chance to reflect on the many moments we've shared throughout the year. From the opportunities to share new research at conferences to the joy of meeting and connecting with new colleagues through our NAEP Doctoral Student Internship Program and NAEP Data Training Workshop, we are reminded of the commitment to education and evidence that define us.

This week, we’re able to share a new working paper, Do Survey Questions Have a Mood? Linking Sentiment to Student Test-Taking Behaviors, from NAEP researchers and co-authors Soo Lee, Ruhan Circi, and Adam Hearn. The working paper explores how test-taking behaviors are impacted by the sentiment of assessment questions, as well as how AI-powered sentiment analysis can help to analyze survey item responses such as those collected by NAEP survey questionnaires. The full text of the working paper is included below; subscribe to the NAEP R&D mailing list to stay up to date as this research develops and to access more opportunities to learn about NAEP data analysis.

The National Council for Measurement in Education’s (NCME) Graduate Student Issues Committee (GSIC) and Educators of Measurement (EoM) Special Interest Group in Measurement in Education (SIGIMIE) are hosting The Lifecycle of an Internship, a webinar designed to give more insight on the education measurement internship process, from2 p.m. to 3 p.m. on November 13, 2024.