How does NAEP select the schools and the students for the assessments?
As the Nations Report Card, NAEP must report accurate results for populations of students and subgroups of these students (e.g., minority students, students from low-income families). To ensure accurate results, the relatively small samples of students must be truly representative of the entire student population in the nation (for the national assessments) or the state (for the state assessments)or the district (for the TUDA assessments). NAEP uses a multistage sampling design that relies on stratification (i.e., classification into groups having similar characteristics) to choose samples of schools and student populations. To ensure an accurate representation of public schools, the samples are randomly selected from groups of schools that have been stratified by variables such as the extent of urbanization, percentage of minority enrollment, and school level results on state achievement tests. For national assessments not involving state-by-state samples, region of the country and me
