A Policymaker's Guide to The Nation's Report Card

Your role as an education policymaker is critical to the success of the education of the nation's children. We hope that the content on this website will help inform the decisions that you make as a policymaker.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas. Since 1969, assessments have been conducted periodically in geography, mathematics, reading, science, U.S. history, writing, and other subjects. The information that is collected in the NAEP assessments will no doubt have an impact on your work in education.

In this section, you will find the following:

• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), chosen to address some of the questions and concerns you might have as a policymaker, and
• Contacts, in case you have further questions about the NAEP program.

To examine the assessments in greater detail, explore the Downloads and Tools page where you will find links to the following:

• State Profiles, a tool that can be used to study the performance of students in each state;
• Frameworks, the blueprints on which the content of the assessment is based;
• Assessment Procedures, pages that discuss the sampling, data collection, data analysis, and reporting procedures used by the NAEP program;
• NAEP Data Explorer, a web-based tool that allows users to generate tables of results from all of the national and state assessments administered by the NAEP program since 1990; and
• NAEP Questions Tool, a web-based tool that contains more than 1,600 actual questions, answers, scoring guides, and question-level data from the NAEP assessments.