About the NAEP Reading Assessment
NAEP Samples
The results from the 2024 reading assessment at grade 12 are based on a national sample of approximately 24,300 twelfth-graders from 1,500 schools who took the assessment either on a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet or a Chromebook. Results are reported for the nation only and reflect the performance of students attending public and private schools.
The results from the assessed students are combined to provide accurate estimates of the overall performance of students in the nation. Results for the nation reflect the performance of students attending public and private schools. Download the data tables via the link at the bottom of the page to see the national sample sizes for the 2024 grade 12 reading assessment.
Each school that participated in the assessment, and each student assessed, represents only a portion of the larger population of interest. The results are weighted to account for the disproportionate representation of some groups in the selected sample, including the oversampling of schools with high concentrations of students from certain racial/ethnic groups and the lower sampling rates of students who attend small schools. Read more about NAEP sampling and weighting in the NAEP Technical Documentation.
NAEP Inclusion
Assessing representative samples of students, including students with disabilities (SD) and English learners (EL), helps to ensure that NAEP results accurately reflect the educational performance of all students in the target population and are a meaningful measure of U.S. students' academic achievement over time.
To ensure that all selected students from the population can be assessed, many of the same accommodations that SD and EL students use on other tests are provided for those students participating in NAEP. Accommodations were first made available for the reading assessment in 1998. The 1998 reading assessments used a split-sample design to make it possible to continue reporting trends in students' reading achievement and, at the same time, to examine how including students assessed with accommodations affect overall assessment results. Separate samples of students were assessed with each of the administration procedures (accommodations permitted and not permitted samples). In this report, the first year with a split sample—1998—shows results for the accommodations permitted sample and for the sample assessed without accommodations. For subsequent assessment years, only results from the accommodated sample are shown. Read more about accommodations available in NAEP. In the NAEP digitally based reading assessment, accommodations such as a text-to-speech for directions were universal design elements integral to the delivery system and available to all students.
Because providing accommodations represented a change in testing conditions that could potentially affect the measurement of changes over time, split national samples of students were assessed in 1998—one sample permitted accommodations and the other did not. Although the results for both samples are presented in the tables and figures, any comparisons to 1998 in the text are based only on the accommodated sample.
Even with the availability of accommodations, some students may still be excluded. Differences in student populations and in state/jurisdiction and district policies and practices for identifying and including SD and EL students should be considered when comparing variations in exclusion and accommodation rates. States/jurisdictions and districts also vary in their proportions of SD and EL students (especially EL students). Download the data tables via the link at the bottom of the page to see the percentages of SD and/or EL students identified, excluded, and assessed in reading in 2024.
In March 2010, the National Assessment Governing Board adopted a new policy outlining specific inclusion goals for NAEP samples. At the national, state, and district levels, the goal is to include 95 percent of all students selected for the NAEP samples, and 85 percent of those in the NAEP sample who are identified as SD or EL. Read more about the inclusion policy and how the percentages of students are calculated.
School and Student Participation
To ensure unbiased samples, NAEP requires that participation rates for original school samples be 70 percent or higher to report national results separately for public and private schools. In instances where participation rates meet the 70 percent criteria but fall below 85 percent, a nonresponse bias analysis is conducted to determine if the responding school sample is not representative of the population, thereby introducing the potential for nonresponse bias.
Before replacing originally sampled schools that declined to participate with substitute schools, the weighted national school participation rates for the 2024 reading assessment were 87 percent for grade 12 (92 percent for public schools, 26 percent for private schools, and 48 percent for Catholic schools). In 2024, the school participation rates for private schools and Catholic schools at grade 12 did not meet the criteria so their results are not reportable.
In 2024, the weighted student participation rates (after makeup sessions) were 68 percent at grade 12 (68 percent for public school students, 69 percent for private school students, and 68 percent for Catholic school students).
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a congressionally mandated project administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the U.S. Department of Education and is the largest continuing and nationally representative assessment of what our nation's students know and can do in select subjects. The NAEP reading assessment uses literary and informational texts to measure students' reading comprehension skills. Students read grade-appropriate passages and answer questions based on what they have read. Results for the 2024 reading assessment at grade 12 are reported for the nation.