About The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) has made it possible for the Ohio Resource Center for Mathematics, Science, and Reading (ORC) to link directly to a bank of test items which have been used in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests administered beginning in 1990. In order to maintain test security, NAEP has not made all of their test items available.

Sample test questions include answers, an explanation of the content or reading passage upon which the questions are based, and a detailed analysis of student responses. For questions which require the student to construct a response, including writing prompts, NCES has also provided samples of student responses and a scoring guide.

In addition to the data provided by NCES, ORC has correlated each test item to Ohio's adopted standards for mathematics, science, and reading. NAEP writing prompts are also provided as a general correlation to Ohio's Writing Standards and are catalogued under ORC's reading resources. This will enable teachers to easily find professionally written test questions that illustrate how particular content elements are assessed.

NCES cautions that test items provided should not be used as practice for future NAEP assessments. The items should be used as samples of how to write assessments for classroom use.

ORC recommends that first-time users of NAEP's web site take advantage of the NAEP Questions Tool Tutorial available from the NAEP home page. This tutorial provides a description of what the user will find on the site, examples of the site's various pages, and suggestions for using the information.