NAEP Technical DocumentationGeography Interrater Agreement

A subsample of the geography responses for each constructed-response item is scored by a second rater to obtain statistics on interrater agreement. In general, geography items receive 25 percent second scoring. This agreement information is also used by the scoring supervisor to monitor the capabilities of all raters and maintain uniformity of scoring across raters. Agreement reports are generated on demand by the scoring supervisor, trainer, scoring director, or item development subject area coordinator. Printed copies are reviewed daily by the lead scoring staff. In addition to the immediate feedback provided by the online agreement reports, each scoring supervisor can also review the actual responses scored by a rater with the backreading tool. In this way, the scoring supervisor can monitor each rater carefully and correct difficulties in scoring almost immediately with a high degree of efficiency.

During the scoring of an item or the scoring of a calibration set, scoring supervisors monitor progress using an interrater agreement tool. This display tool functions in either of two modes:

• to display information of all first readings versus all second readings, or  

• to display all readings of an individual which were also scored by another rater versus the scores assigned by the other raters.

The information is displayed as a matrix with scores awarded during first readings displayed in rows and scores awarded during second readings displayed in columns. Results may be reviewed for either individual scorers or the team as a whole. In this format, instances of exact agreement fall along the diagonal of the matrix. For completeness, data in each cell of the matrix contain the number and percentage of cases of agreement (or disagreement). The display also contains information on the total number of second readings and the overall percentage of agreement on the item. Since the interrater agreement reports are cumulative, a printed copy of the agreement of each item is made periodically and compared to previously generated reports. Scoring staff members save printed copies of all final agreement reports and archive them with the training sets.

Links to scoring statistics for constructed-response items, geography national assessment: 2001, 2010, and 2014

Year	Item-by-item rater agreement	Interrater agreement ranges	Number of constructed-response items
2014	X	X	X
2010	X	X	X
2001	X	X	X
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2001, 2010, and 2014 Geography Assessments.

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