The NAEP Data Explorer: Digging Deeper into K-12 Geography Achievement and Why It Matters

Abstract

When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program releases its reports on student achievement in various subjects, the data are added to the NAEP Data Explorer (NDE) website.1 The NDE offers tools to visualize students’ achievement patterns over time. Users can also compare achievement scores disaggregated by student background characteristics, school environment, community characteristics, and curriculum content and instructional practices. The NDE has been shown to support reflective educational practices in the social studies (Fitchett and Heafner 2013). Working with assessment data can stimulate ideas for how teachers can critique and evaluate curriculum making and instructional practices. However, there are no published accounts of geography teachers using the NDE for such purposes (Gribben, Schultz, and Woods 2019). To illustrate how NAEP data can address questions of concern to geography educators, this article reports the results of a study that investigated the following two questions with the help of the NDE: