Abstract
Like all studies involved in the assessment of trends in educational performance, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is confronted with an array of unresolved methodological and philosophical issues. One of the basic dilemmas faced by NAEP is how to measure performance change while remaining responsive to advances in curriculum and the technology of assessment. NAEP has become much more cautious about making seemingly insubstantial changes in the assessment because of the so-called NAEP reading anomaly—an apparently steep drop between 1984 and 1986 in estimated reading proficiency that was found to have resulted in part from changes in the order and context in which items appeared. Other issues that NAEP must consider in reporting performance trends are the effect of measurement scale indeterminacies and the ways in which interpretation of trend results can depend on the statistics that are selected for comparing proficiency distributions over time.
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