NAEP Website Tools and Applications
The NAEP website features a number of applications designed to give users quick and easy access to questions from previous assessments, performance comparisons, and NAEP assessment data for quick or complex analyses. Read about each tool below, and print Quick Reference Guides if you are a new user:
Explore NAEP Questions
This is a suite of tools and information that provides a comprehensive look at some of the items administered to students in main NAEP or in long-term trend NAEP. These tools may be accessed clicking "SAMPLE QUESTIONS" in the top navigation bar on any page on this website. "Explore NAEP Questions" contains three tools—the NAEP Questions Tool, the Item Maps, and Test Yourself:
- The NAEP Questions Tool (NQT) is a tool to explore
- questions asked during past assessments;
- examples of actual student responses for open-ended questions;
- scoring guides that explain the criteria used to score open-ended NAEP exercises, and answer keys;
- graphs with data that indicate overall student performance;
- content classification of questions, based on the framework that guided the development of the assessment;
- detailed data on the responses, classified by NAEP's major reporting categories; and
- printing or downloading NAEP questions and accompanying material easily.
An advanced search feature of the NQT lets users find and examine the performance of groups of students in a particular content area. Users can search for items at a certain level of difficulty (easy, medium, or hard) or of a particular type (multiple choice, constructed response, or extended constructed response). State results as well as national results are available for mathematics, reading, science, and writing assessments; for the other subjects, the data are available at the national level only.
If you are a new user, please be sure to use the Tool Help button to find out more about using the NQT, and to learn from the tutorial lessons. If you are already familiar with the tool, go directly to NQT.
- Item Maps
Item maps illustrate the knowledge and skills demonstrated by students performing at different scale scores on a given assessment. The item map provides concrete examples of what students at various achievement levels are likely to know and can do in a subject. If you are a new user, read on, and you may also want to read more about item mapping. If you are already familiar with this application, go directly to the item maps.
The item maps contain many released questions that are linked directly to the NAEP Questions Tool in order to provide more information about the item and student performance on it. Use the selection box to choose item maps for civics, economics, mathematics, reading, science, or U.S. history by year and by grade. Item maps have these features:
- each item is marked with a symbol to indicate its content classification;
- "Compare Student Groups" aids visualization of performance of selected groups by state or in the nation; and
- scaleable vector graphics (SVG), present mappings of percentiles in box-and-whisker format.
- Test Yourself!
Try out actual questions administered to students in the NAEP assessments. Choose a subject and a grade, and try several questions that were asked on the most recent assessment. You will find that
- as in the actual assessment, some of the questions are multiple choice, and others are constructed response;
- you can type your answers in the space provided, similar to the way students handwrite their responses to constructed response questions; and
- you will get feedback on your answers, and will see how the nation's students answered the same questions.
Test Yourself—it takes only a couple of minutes, and it's fun as well as informative!
State Profiles
State Profiles contain a wealth of information about the public school student and school characteristics for each state, territory, or other jurisdiction participating in NAEP. If you are a new user, please read on. If you are already familiar with this application, go directly to State Profiles.
Information listed in the State Profiles includes
- the number of students enrolled;
- the racial/ethnic make-up of school populations;
- per pupil expenditures;
- a quick reference table that provides an overview of each state's performance in NAEP assessments;
- a clickable bar chart that can compare scale scores for the state with those of the nation, and achievement level percentages;
- cross-state comparison maps using easy-to-understand graphics (these maps require downloading a free browser plug-in for viewing scalable vector graphics); and
- quick links to the most recent state reports.
The State Profiles tool also provide a quick entry into the data for your state or jurisdiction through a direct search in the NAEP Data Explorer (NDE), where you can investigate data over several years and in many other ways.
State Comparisons
The State Comparisons tool can create tables comparing states based on their average NAEP scale scores for selected groups of public school students (gender, race/ethnicity for three groups, eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches, or high and low percentiles). To set the scope for the state comparison, select grade, NAEP assessment subject, and student group of interest, then choose either single-year or cross-year mode. When those have been selected, press Next Steps. On the new page, the states will be listed alphabetically. Selecting the state of interest, then selecting the clickable header of a column will rearrange the states in order of their scale scores (or differences in scale scores when comparing two years).
This tool can order states by scores in one year, or examine the change in performance between two assessment years. For example,
- see how the average reading score for male students in a particular state compares to the average reading score for male students in other states in 2005, or
- see how the change (from 2002 to the focal year) in reading scores for male students in a particular state compares to the change in reading scores for male students in other states.
This tool shows whether the selected comparisons are statistically different from one another. However, note that the sort order is based on numeric precision to several decimal places—so the score of a state appearing higher in the sort order may not actually be significantly different (according to a statistical test) from a state appearing lower in the order.
NAEP Data Explorer
The NAEP Data Explorer (NDE) gives you a system that is easy to use and that provides great flexibility to explore data and create customized reports. If you are a new user, please read on. If you prefer to go directly to the NAEP Data Explorer, you can click "ANALYZE DATA" in the top navigation bar on any page. From the NDE Welcome page, you can get started with the NDE tutorial. The tutorial is available in Flash and non-Flash versions. From this page, you can select the dataset of interest—main NAEP or long-term trend assessments, or the High School Transcript Study. Once you have selected "I agree" on the NCES legal agreement, you will be ready to explore! If your session times out (20 minutes of inactivity), agreeing again to the legal agreement will put you back where you left off. You will find context-sensitive, searchable Help on each page in this tool.
For the main NAEP database, there are two interfaces—Quick Start and Advanced. Both interfaces provide sophisticated graphing and significance testing capabilities, and produce tables that can be exported into a spreadsheet. There is a version for users who rely on screen readers. Some of the other features are listed below.
The Quick Start interface provides fast access to NAEP data, giving you the ability to
- access the most requested data (the major reporting groups for the most recent year or for all years);
- see all available performance measures for the groups you choose (average scale scores, achievement levels, percentiles, percentages of the chosen variable, and standard deviation);
- generate two-way tables by selecting two of the available background variables to cross-tabulate in your preferred order;
- customize formats for data tables;
- perform significance tests on the data in your tables;
- view gaps between student groups and changes in these gaps over time; and
- select graphics options, including cross-state bar charts and trend lines, graphs showing percentiles and achievement levels, and graphs designed for cross tabulations.
The Advanced interface facilitates even more customization of NAEP data, giving you the ability to
- access data from all NAEP variables and all years or any combination of years;
- generate N-way tables (as many variables as can be supported by the data, recognizing that disclosure rules eventually impose limitations on the number of crosses);
- select multiple simultaneous cross-tabulations for any available background variables;
- view all performance measures associated with NAEP data (average scale scores with standard deviations if selected, achievement levels, percentiles, etc.);
- change proficiency scales;
- collapse categories to combine any of the categories of a variable into one category, or combine one or more states or other jurisdictions to see data from this "new" jurisdiction;
- perform a regression analysis with scale scores; and
- access additional databases such as long-term trend and high school transcript data.
Quick Reference Guides
NAEP tools are easy to use. To understand what you can do with these tools, see these Quick Reference Guides (QRG). They are PDF files that you can print easily:
Last updated 10 March 2008 (NB)
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