Addressing Reporting Challenges for Private School Samples in NAEP by Enhancing Representativeness Through Combining Years

Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as "The Nation's Report Card," provides essential insights into student achievement across the United States. However, reporting challenges persist, particularly for small subgroups and low response rates in private schools. This presentation introduces a methodology developed in collaboration with NCES to address these issues. For private schools, we propose a substitution approach to use matched respondents from prior years to mitigate nonresponse bias. Using exact matching on key school characteristics and bias assessment metrics such as Hellinger distance and Kullback-Leibler divergence, the approach demonstrates promising improvements in representativeness and meeting response rate thresholds. While effective for earlier years, limitations arise with declining response rates in recent cycles, prompting further evaluation. These strategies offer insights for sustaining the integrity and utility of NAEP reporting.

Nonresponse bias

Sample substitution