How are students selected for NAEP and how many of them are assessed for each exam?
NAEP is a representative-sample assessment. It reports on the achievement of large groups of students, and does not give results for individuals or schools. Participating schools are selected by the National Center for Education Statistics and its contractor according to a sampling frame in order to produce results that are nationally representative and also representative of participating states and urban districts. Within each school students are selected randomly from a list of all those enrolled at the target grade. Individual schools and students cannot volunteer for NAEP, and state, district, and local officials cannot choose the students or schools that become involved. Information about students and schools are kept confidential. In national-only samples there usually are about 8,000 to 12,000 students assessed per subject per grade in about 400 to 650 public and private schools. For a particular subject, each state sample has about 2,500 to 3,000 students per grade in about 10
