This is the culmination of a Cooperative Agreement that was awarded to Dr. Kaplan in July 2019. Cooperative Agreements are one of the tools NAEP uses to advance its goals of keeping an accurate measure of student progress and advancing the field of large-scale assessment. Dr. Kaplan used this opportunity to establish a “proof-of-concept” of how NAEP data can inform policy through more than descriptive plots. In December 2020, he presented at the NAEP R&D Virtual Showcase about how data from NAEP state samples can be used to specify cross-state growth regressions as well as to build foreword looking Bayesian probabilistic predictive models to forecast policy-relevant predictors of educational outcomes. Dr. Kaplan expanded on the Bayesian forecasting potential of NAEP data in the study he published in Large-scale Assessment in Education in July 2021.  

Through the Cooperative Agreements program, NCES funded work leading to the possible expansion of the utility of NAEP and other large-scale assessments. The full-text of Dr. Kaplan’s study, “Bayesian probabilistic forecasting with large-scale educational trend data: A case study using NAEP,” can be found on Springer.