State education agencies are sitting on rich repositories of quantitative and qualitative assessment data. This document is designed to provide a conceptual framework and implementation guidance that can help agency leadership leverage and interrogate student performance data in systematic ways for reporting, outreach, and planning purposes. The…

Researchers often assess causal effects of educational programs or policies using educational assessment data. This dissertation explores novel methods of estimating causal effects in educational assessment data and is broken into three parts. The first part proposes a regression discontinuity design with an ordinal running variable to assess the…

IES is the primary research, evaluation, and statistics arm of the U.S. Department of Education. Established through the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA), the Institute's mission is to expand fundamental knowledge and understanding of education and to provide education leaders and practitioners, parents and students, researchers, and…

The technological capacity that now exists to gather and store large amounts of data has improved access to information regarding young people in schools. Improvements in data management techniques and statistical data software packages have made retrieving and analysing systems data a more accessible and manageable process. On a smaller scale,…

As the United States continues to grow and the composition of its population shifts, expanding opportunity and reducing barriers to education must be a national priority. An essential first step toward greater educational equality is a deeper understanding of the fundamental changes in the demographic composition of the nation. Consider, for…

Forty years ago, the National Center for Education Statistics initiated the national longitudinal studies program in response to congressional concern for policy-relevant information on school-to-work transitions. This program has grown substantially, and not unexpectedly, questions have arisen about its usefulness and present operation. This…

The National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) oversees and sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Since 1969, NAEP has provided information to the public on the achievement of the nation's elementary and secondary students at grades 4, 8, and 12. As the only continuing measure of student achievement at grade 12,…

This editorial reviews recent studies of accountability policies using National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data and compares the use of aggregate NAEP data to the availability of individual-level data from NAEP. While the individual-level NAEP data sets are restricted-access and do not give accurate point-estimates of achievement,…

This document explains the major features of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in a non-technical manner. It highlights the history and development of NAEP, how the data are collected, scored, and analyzed, and how the results are reported. This introductory guide to NAEP is designed to meet the information needs of teachers,…

This final report on the Preliminary Evaluation of Planned Variation in Head Start According to Follow Through Approaches is a detailed account of the field testing and implementation activities performed during the 1969-1972 period, with emphasis on the second and third years. The sections of the report are as follows: I. Introduction; II.…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 1998 Civics Assessment found that 12th-graders who participated in volunteer service had higher scores than those who did not. Furthermore, 12th-graders who worked 6 to 15 hours a week had higher scores than those who either worked longer hours or did not work at all. (Contains two tables and…

THIS STUDY, CONDUCTED BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION (MLA) WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF THE EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE, WAS DESIGNED TO DETERMINE WHETHER THE FRENCH, GERMAN, AND SPANISH SKILL TESTS OF THE MLA COOPERATIVE FOREIGN LANGUAGE TESTS AND THE MLA PROFICIENCY TESTS FOR TEACHERS AND ADVANCED STUDENTS MEASURE ALONG A CONTINUUM OR WHETHER…

The report presents a summary assessment of knowledge about traditional Western forms of art among 9-year-old, 13-year-old, and 17-year-old students. Part of national information gathering project related to educational achievement in various learning areas, the report is presented in three chapters. Chapter I examines instruments used to measure…