In the News
What is it about those NAEP tests? In his new Huffington Post opinion piece, MƒA President John Ewing analyzes the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) Long-Term Assessment in mathematics – and addresses the confusion surrounding the scores.
“NAEP has been around for a little more than four decades. It provides an enormous trove of data about K-12 education, across time and across the nation. While it’s a wonderful tool, NAEP data (like its language) can easily be misunderstand—usually by those who don’t realize that tests and their data are complicated."
In the piece, Dr. Ewing examines the NAEP average scores for the three groups of students (ages 9, 13, and 17), paying specific attention to the average NAEP scores for White, Black, and Hispanic 17 year-olds. The findings leave many questions:
“Many similarly deep questions arise for NAEP.
- While achievement gaps for Black and Hispanic students narrowed during this period, almost all the narrowing occurred prior to 1990? Why? What changed?
- What caused the gender gap to narrow?
- How did doubling the percentage of 13 year-olds taking algebra affect scores?
Such questions are simple to state, but each has a complicated answer. In any case, we are unlikely to find those answers if we insist that interpreting test results is simple, that using precise language is splitting hairs, and that employing statistics with care is merely wading in academic minutia.”
Read Dr. Ewing’s entire article, “About Those NAEP Tests,” on the Huffington Post.