How does NAAL differ from school-based literacy assessments like NAEP?
NAAL questions reflect the tasks and stimulus materials that adults encounter in daily life. A school-based assessment like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) focuses more directly on a participant’s ability to read, and less on a participant’s ability to apply what they have read to accomplish everyday literacy goals. Also, NAAL is 100 percent open-ended (requires short-answer responses), and questions are placed before the stimulus material so that respondents have to search the text for information. School-based assessments like NAEP have a percentage of multiple-choice questions and answers, and questions are placed after the stimulus material, so that students have to read the entire text for full comprehension before answering the question. In terms of scoring, NAAL differs from school-based assessments because it scores responses as partially correct if they lead to partial accomplishment of the task. NAAL offers greater insight into the correlation between p
