NAEP Assessment Sample Design → NAEP 2011 Sample Design → Sample Design for the 2011 National Assessment → 2011 Fourth- and Eighth-Grade Private School National Assessment → Sampling Frame for the 2011 Private School National Assessment

NAEP Technical DocumentationSampling Frame for the 2011 Private School National Assessment

			Fourth- and Eighth-Grade Schools and Enrollment in the Private School Sampling Frame New-School Sampling Frame for the Private School Assessment

The frame of the private schools in all three grades was developed from the 2007-2008 Private School Universe Survey (PSS), a survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The PSS is a biennial mail survey of all private schools in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The PSS frame of schools comprises both a list frame and an area frame. The 2007-2008 list frame is an assembly of the 2005-2006 PSS frame and more up-to-date lists from state education agencies, private school associations, and other easily accessible sources. To improve the coverage of the PSS list frame, the Census Bureau also conducted a survey to locate private schools in a random sample of geographic areas throughout the United States. The areas were single counties or groups of counties sampled from an area frame constructed from all counties in the nation. Within each selected area a complete list of private schools was gathered using information from the Yellow Pages, religious institutions, local education agencies, chambers of commerce, and local government offices. Schools not already on the list frame were identified and added to the frame of private schools. A weighting component was computed by the Census Bureau so that the additional area-frame schools would represent all schools absent from the list frame, not just those in the selected areas.

The sampling frame excluded schools that were ungraded, provided only special education, were part of hospital or treatment center programs, were juvenile correctional institutions, were home-school entities, or were for adult education.

Private school affiliation is unknown for nonrespondents to the PSS. Because oversampling was desired to report by affiliation, additional work was done to obtain affiliation for nonrespondents to the PSS. If a nonresponding school responded to a previous PSS (either two or four years prior), affiliation was obtained from the previous response. For those schools that were nonrespondents for the last three cycles of the PSS, in some cases Internet research was used to establish affiliation. There were still schools with unknown affiliation remaining after this process.

For quality control purposes, school and student counts from the 2011 sampling frame were compared to school and student counts from previous NAEP frames (2009 and 2007). No major issues were found.

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