The NAEP Racial/Ethnic Achievement Gap Tool: Gaining Deeper Insight Into Achievement Gaps

• In Event: Appraising Equity in Education With The Nation’s Report Card and Beyond

Abstract

Ever since the Coleman Report of 1965 highlighted the Black-White achievement gap among students in the United States, educational researchers have been interested in measuring racial/ethnic achievement gaps. In the nearly half century since the report’s publication, the Black-White achievement gap among our nation’s students has remained stubbornly constant. Hanushek (2016) estimated that at the current rate of improvement, it will take about two and a half centuries for the Black-White gap in mathematics to close. In order to make progress toward reversing this trajectory, it is imperative that we have a better understanding the forces that drive achievement gaps.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is congressionally mandated to measure achievement gaps between select racial/ethnic groups across different grades and subjects. Research has shown that NAEP achievement gaps change when controlling for additional covariates available in NAEP data, especially covariates related to student and/or school level socioeconomic status (Eckerly et al., 2021). To allow consumers of NAEP data to observe how average score gaps between White–Black, White–Hispanic, and Asian–White students change when additional factors are considered, NCES developed the interactive Racial/Ethnic Achievement Gap Tool.

The Racial/Ethnic Achievement Gap Tool utilizes regression analyses to adjust observed NAEP achievement gaps by controlling for different combinations of variables including: socioeconomic status indicators; students’ postsecondary plans and academic behaviors (where applicable), and students’ approaches to learning. As one example, the tool allows users see that the White-Black gap in grade 8 reading is reduced by 48 percent and the White-Hispanic gap by 89 percent when controlling for a set of socio-economic indictors. This presentation will introduce the audience to the publicly available tool (which includes analyses for NAEP reading and mathematics data at grades 4, 8, and 12), details about the methodology, and selected examples highlighting its utility.

Authors

• Carol Eckerly, Educational Testing Service

• Madeline Goodman, Educational Testing Service

• Robert Finnegan, Educational Testing Service