Ensuring Data Quality in Student Lists Submitted for Sampling for the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress

Oregon Convention Center 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a congressionally-mandated series of surveys measuring the proficiency of American students in a variety of academic subjects. Cooperating schools electronically submit lists of students in the target grade, from which sampled students are drawn. Schools store their data in different ways, so the incoming student lists must be standardized for use in NAEP. Each list submitter maps the columns in their file to specific NAEP fields and the values in each column to specific NAEP values. To ensure the quality of the student lists and the students' demographic data, data checks are run on each student list after the mapping work is done. The fields subject to these checks are student name, gender, student disability status, English learner status, race/ethnicity, school lunch eligibility status, grade, and month and year of birth. Some checks are straightforward, but others are more complex or involve statistical tests. This paper describes the types of data checks performed on the 11,500 student lists submitted for NAEP 2022 and presents results including the number of data check failures and false-positive rates by check type.