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PEMD-92-22R 1 (1992-03-11)

handle is hein.gao/gaobacjzf0001 and id is 1 raw text is: United States General Accounting Office Washington, D.C. 20548 Program Evaluation and Methodology Division March 11, 1992 146115 The Honorable William D. Ford Chairman, Committee on Education and Labor House of Representatives The Honorable Dale E. Kildee Chairman, Subcommittee on Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education House of Representatives On September 30, 1991, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) released a report that interpreted U.S. students' achievement in mathematics on the 1990 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in terms of a set of performance standards. NAEP, a nationwide test funded by the Department of Education and administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) under NAGB's direction, had measured student achievement in basic subjects since 1969 without reference to specific goals or standards. However, the 1988 legislation that created NAGB also made it responsible for identifying appropriate achievement goals. NAGB designed and implemented an approach to define basic, proficient, and advanced levels of achievement and to express each level in terms of a score on the 1990 mathematics assessment. It reported proportions of students who reached each level even though its evaluation consultants and others had expressed concerns about the appropriateness of the NAGB approach and about the technical quality of the 1990 results. This letter is an interim response to your October 7, 1991, request for a review of the NAGB achievement levels and related matters, summarizing our findings and conclusions at this point in our work. Our full report will be completed later this year. Your letter noted the wide interest in issues of how to set standards and measure progress toward them, interest that is continuing in view of the recommendations of the National Council on Educational Standards and Testing (NCEST) for more of both such efforts. It is important that pioneering efforts such as NAGB's be fully examined and their strengths and limitations explicitly identified so as to provide the soundest possible guidance to future definitions and applications of standards. GAO/PEMD-92-22R National Assessment Technical Quality

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