Is it time to update NAEP?
Common Core classrooms shift away from what the nation's report card measures
the most recent nationwide U.S. math test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, an eighth grader might have been asked a question about stem-and-leaf plots (see the sample question in the graphic on this page or here).
Have no idea what those are? Probably the eighth grader didn’t either. It’s an old-fashioned way to depict data, one that isn’t used much anymore. The Common Core standards, used in more than 40 states, intentionally pared down the list of data representations that students should learn to ones that are commonly used in the real world, such as bar charts and time-series graphs, so that students could spend more time mastering them.
But the NAEP, unchanged since 1990, tested eighth graders on stem-and-leaf plots anyway. “It becomes something of an IQ test to figure out what the heck you’re looking at,” said Fran Stancavage at the American Institutes of Research, a nonprofit research organization that has helped develop the NAEP exam for the U.S government.
So when the 2015 NAEP results came out last month, showing the first declines in math scores in 25 years (a two-point drop in fourth-grade math and a three-point drop in eighth-grade math between 2013 and 2015), Stancavage didn’t think the problem was only that teachers needed more practice and training to teach the new Common Core material effectively.
“The kinds of things we’re seeing, it wouldn’t matter if someone had become an expert implementer,” said Stancavage. “Some of these things the kids have never been exposed to.”
In other words, last month’s NAEP scores might have gone down even if every teacher in the nation had taught the new Common Core content perfectly.
Stancavage has made a career out of developing and maintaining the NAEP exam and her work is one of the reasons that the NAEP is prized as an unbiased yardstick of educational progress. She recently co-authored an October 2015 study, comparing NAEP content with the Common Core standards, and found several areas of what she calls “mismatch”.
It’s all in the timing
For example, certain geometry concepts, particularly terminology and vocabulary, have been purposely shifted from fourth to fifth grade in Common Core, so that students can spend more time with fractions in fourth grade. Even if students have the knowledge to Is it time to update NAEP? - The Hechinger Report:
