For more than four decades the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has tracked the achievement of U.S. students in major academic subjects. This national resource is the only assessment that states and now many urban districts can look to as an objective yardstick of their performance over time, relative to national benchmarks, and…

It's no surprise that, 28 years after the publication of "A Nation at Risk," school-reform efforts have generated so little effect. The nation's schools have proven, over the past century, adept at resisting change. Recent attempts to inject accountability and innovation have brought an important opportunity. No Child Left Behind helped…

Effective evidence-based action requires getting the right data into the right hands at the right time to help make decisions. The Data Quality Campaign (2011) has provided suggestions to state education agencies for effectively using data within state longitudinal data systems. One suggestion is to identify "the variety of ways available…

Communicating data without some measure of their precision can lead to misinterpretation and incorrect inferences. Several conventions for displaying error along with the data they modify are described and illustrated. Alternatives are offered that seem to provide improvements in the effective communication of error as well as increasing their…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is an enormous and enormously ambitious project. It generates data of a richness and complexity beyond any simple survey. The broad utilization of the information it provides can be aided through the use of more evocative data displays. In this report, the uses to which data tables are put is…