R&D Hub

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.

This week, the NAEP R&D Hub is able to offer yet another sneak peek at some upcoming research from experts in large-scale assessment. Authored by Ruhan Circi, a NAEP process data researcher from the American Institutes for Research, alongside Maggie Perkoff, one of our 2024 summer doctoral interns, this working paper was produced as part of the Summer 2024 NAEP Doctoral Student Internship Program AI focus area. The authors also wish to thank Bhashithe Abeysinghe for his review of the working paper. It presents insights from a literature review on using LLMs for automated scoring of constructed response items, briefly explores how advancements in LLMs can improve current scoring systems, and highlights the remaining challenges and areas for further research.

The NAEP R&D Hub is often able to give readers in the NAEP research community a sneak peek at upcoming research from experts in the field. This week, we’re happy to share some research work from NAEP researchers Ruhan Circi and Bhashithe Abeysinghe on passage text difficulty and language models, soon to become a white paper on the topic, “A Voice from Past: Passage Text Difficulty in the Hive of Language Models.” Check out the full text of the preview below and remember to subscribe to stay connected with other exciting research and opportunities to get involved!

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.  

There's just one weekend remaining to apply for the 2024 NAEP Data Training Workshop! After you've submitted your application, check out another valuable resource to stay on top of NAEP news: the official blog of the nation’s report card, NAEP Plus.