The Future of NAEP: New Opportunities, New Challenges

In an effort to continuously advance the NAEP program, NCES has convened a series of meetings focusing on the future of NAEP. Participants engaged in productive discussions and debates, exchanging forward-thinking ideas about what role NAEP should play five, ten, and twenty years down the road.

January 2013 Workshop

NCES convened its most recent workshop in January 2013. State and district assessment staff met to develop and prioritize recommendations for NAEP within the following four key areas:

An Innovations Laboratory: Thirteen Goals for Assessment Programs of the Future
Using Technology in NAEP and State Assessments
Delivering Meaningful Results
Sharing Data, Knowledge, and Information

Working groups in each of these areas came to the consensus that NAEP must embrace the changing landscape of education assessment, identify the place it will hold in the next 10 years, and work quickly to position itself for the future. A highlights summary of the workshop is available below:

NAEP: Looking Ahead - The NAEP-State Partnership (449 KB)

2012 Panel: Improving the Measurement of Socioeconomic Status

NAEP results inform educators, policymakers, and the general public about the performance of students. Reports include overall results as well as scores for student subgroups that are of interest to the target audiences, such as gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (SES).

To improve the measurement and reporting of SES and its relationship to academic achievement in the context of NAEP, NCES convened a panel of experts to provide recommendations concerning SES as a construct, with the understanding that their recommendations might ultimately lead to a new measure of SES that could be used for NAEP.

Read the panel's paper, Improving the Measurement of Socioeconomic Status for the National Assessment of Educational Progress: A Theoretical Foundation. (315 KB)

August 2011 and January 2012 Summits

A diverse group of experts in assessment, measurement, cognition, and technology convened during the first Future of NAEP summit in August 2011. The conversation continued in January 2012, when state and local stakeholders gathered at the second summit. These meetings resulted in a white paper, written by a panel of participants from both summits. The white paper, titled NAEP: Looking Ahead—Leading Assessment into the Future, summarizes the discussions of the two groups and their recommendations on the role of NAEP. The full white paper and highlights of the paper are available below:

For additional information, please contact Patricia Etienne at (202) 219-7054.

Last updated 07 March 2018 (DS)