WHAT IS NAEP?
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only assessment that measures what U.S. students know and can do in various subjects across the nation, states, and in some urban districts. Also known as The Nation’s Report Card, NAEP has provided important information about how students are performing academically since 1969.
NAEP is a congressionally mandated project administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
NAEP is given to a representative sample of students across the country. Results are reported for groups of students with similar characteristics (e.g., gender, race and ethnicity, school location), not individual students. National results are available for all subjects assessed by NAEP. State and selected urban district results are available for mathematics, reading, and (in some assessment years) science and writing.
WHO IS TESTED AND WHEN?
A random sampling of students in 4th grade selected by NAEP at selected schools will be tested.
WHEN IS NAEP at MES? TBD - February 2026
RESULTS OF NAEP:
The results of NAEP are released as The Nation’s Report Card. Depending on the assessment, NAEP results are available for the nation, states, and select urban districts that participate in TUDA. Results are also available for different student groups based on factors such as race/ ethnicity, gender, school location, and more. NAEP is not designed to collect or report results for individual students, classrooms, or schools. Within a school, just some of the student population participates, and student responses are combined with those from other participating students to produce the results.
You can access data from previous assessments at https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata and explore the most recent results at https://www. nationsreportcard.gov/. As part of main NAEP, students in grades 4 and 8 are scheduled to be assessed at the national and state levels in mathematics and reading every 2 years. Under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, districts and states that receive Title I funds are required to participate in these biennial assessments. Other subjects are assessed periodically. NAEP long-term trend assessments allow the performance of today’s students to be compared with students since the early 1970s and are administered periodically to 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds.
NAEP - Nation's Report Card
