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Civic learning is an increasingly salient topic in research, policy, and practice. However, the recent empirical evidence on access to civic learning opportunities is limited. We build on prior research using survey items from the 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress civics assessment and provide descriptive evidence on disparities in access to three categories of civics content and three evidence-based instructional approaches. We highlight inequalities in opportunities by student characteristics, school characteristics, and state characteristics among a national sample of more than 10,000 8th-grade students enrolled in a course with at least some civics focus (controlling for variation in the extent of civics focus). Our findings conflict with most of the prior evidence regarding disparities in access by race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background, favoring Black students, Hispanic students, and students of relatively lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This suggests a shift in recent years, potentially due to an increased focus on equity. English learners and students with disabilities also reported greater access than their counterparts. Other findings include inequalities across school types, school location (city students reporting greater opportunity than both rural and suburban students), census region, and state testing policy. Additional findings are presented, and implications and opportunities for future research are discussed.

There is a growing interest in ensuring that students are prepared for college and a career when they finish high school. Research identified several indicators that are associated with college preparedness including attendance, grade point average (GPA), and test scores. However, it is difficult to use these indicators to determine the preparedness level of the nation's students in general. This study used results from National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics assessment, the "gold standard" assessing what students know and can do in grade 12 to establish college preparedness benchmarks. This study linked ninth-grade student background data and school-reported high school and postsecondary transcript data from the National High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) to student item responses on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics assessment to examine the relationship between college preparedness and NAEP mathematics achievement. NAEP scale scores imputed for all HSLS:09 participants via marginal maximum likelihood regression analyses were used to predict college preparedness. This study extended the earlier investigations of college preparedness based on NAEP grade 12 mathematics data from the prediction of college enrollment alone to the prediction of additional postsecondary outcomes including remedial course-taking and first-year college GPA based on postsecondary transcript data. Defining college preparedness as enrolling in a 2- or 4-year college without remedial course-taking and acquiring a first-year college GPA of 2.7 or higher as did National Assessment Governing Board, this study showed that the probability of college preparedness increased from 26 percent for students performing at the NAEP Basic level to 58 percent at the NAEP Proficient level and 87 percent at the NAEP Advanced level. The probabilities at preparedness increased when the definition of college preparedness omitted remedial course-taking. Although similar patterns were observed for various student groups including race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status, there were some differences in results across groups. Since the report shows the probability of college preparedness (under various definitions) at each NAEP achievement level, it is thereby also providing important validity information for these NAEP achievement levels.

Ensuring that students are ready for college when they graduate from high school has important implications for students, educators, education policymakers, and other stakeholders. This study focuses on an examination of the relationship between the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) grade 12 mathematics assessment and college entry to identify benchmarks on the NAEP grade 12 Mathematics Assessment that are indicative of the skills prerequisite for college enrollment. Using data from High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) and the 2013 NAEP overlap sample, this study identifies college preparedness benchmarks on the Grade 12 NAEP mathematics assessment including college enrollment, selectivity of the college enrolled, remedial course-taking, enrolling in STEM major, and persistence in postsecondary education. Results provide validity evidence for the NAEP achievement levels in terms of college preparedness, especially the NAEP proficient and NAEP college preparedness indicator.

This study linked ninth-grade student background data and school-reported high school transcript data from the national High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) to student item responses on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics assessment to examine the relationships between high school coursework and end-of-high school mathematics achievement. In a series of marginal maximum likelihood regression analyses, we find that STEM course GPAs, credits earned in AP/IB math and science courses, higher levels of math course content, and course-taking in chemistry and physics are all positively associated with NAEP math achievement. These relationships persist even when gender, race/ethnicity, early grade 9 mathematics achievement, and socioeconomic status are included as covariates. Cluster analysis of students with high estimated achievement suggest multiple paths to high mathematics achievement for students with both high- and low-socioeconomic status backgrounds.

This study uses the overlap sample of about 3,500 students who participated both in the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) and the 2013 Grade 12 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics assessment to investigate how mathematics motivation (mathematics identity, mathematics self-efficacy, and mathematics interest) at grade 9 and 11 is related to grade 12 NAEP mathematics performance, simultaneously taking into account grade 9 mathematics achievement, family and school background factors, and grade 11 educational expectations and high school mathematics coursetaking.

Filling the STEM pipeline from secondary schools to postsecondary institutions is essential for the nations' competitiveness in the 21st century. It is therefore crucial to motivate more high school students to consider entering one of the STEM fields and to prepare themselves by taking advanced coursework in STEM that will prime them for choosing a STEM major in college, and eventually, a STEM career. High school students' pathway to a college STEM major can be seen as related to a series of academic choices (e.g., middle school STEM related activities, high school STEM coursetaking, and outside of school activities) and achievements that begin in early schooling years and continue to develop in secondary school (Eccles, 1994; Wang, 2013; Wang & Degol, 2013). This current study develops a comprehensive conceptual framework to describe how high school STEM coursetaking, STEM GPA, and motivational beliefs on science and mathematics are related to students' decisions about whether to choose a STEM major at 4-year college after taking into consideration student, family, and school background factors. The conceptual framework focuses on the direct relationships between five factors and choosing a STEM major in college: mathematics motivation, science motivation, high school STEM coursetaking, STEM achievement, and social networks. The results of simple comparisons of mathematics and science motivation between students in STEM- and non-STEM majors indicated that STEM-major students have a higher level of mathematics and science motivation in all four measured constructs (mathematics identity, mathematics self-efficacy, science identity, and science self-efficacy) compared to non-STEM major students. The structural equation model (SEM) results, which take into consideration of factors for other high school experiences, further identified the significant relationships between STEM motivation and having a STEM major in college. The findings suggest that science identity had the strongest association with students' choice of a STEM major among all other motivation variables, STEM coursetaking, and achievement variables.

Educational inequality due to family socioeconomic status (SES) has been the focus of both public dialogue and education research in the United States for many years. The current study aims to understand how educational inequality due to family SES has changed in the United States. Specifically, the study focuses on the changes in achievement gaps between high and low SES students between 2003 and 2017 and the changes in the performance of low-SES students over time. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) grade 8 mathematics assessment were used for the analyses. Results show that the SES achievement gap at the national level has remained the same over time. State-level results suggest that 34 of the 50 states' SES achievement gaps experienced no significant change between 2003 and 2017, 14 gaps widened, and only two SES gaps narrowed. In addition, at the national level, more low-SES students achieved at the NAEP Basic and at the NAEP Proficient levels over time with a majority of states improving their low-SES students' performance. In conclusion, the study contributes to the existing literature not only by reflecting on U.S. national trends using an effective SES index, but also by providing state-level results. It also collects trend data on states' macro-level indicators, including economic growth, social inequality, and educational expenditures, allowing state-specific findings to be presented in the context of changes in macro-level context. Initial explorations of relationships between state SES achievement gap trends and macroeconomic factors are presented to motivate future research. The trends in SES achievement gaps and the specific policy contexts are presented in greater detail for 13 states/jurisdictions.

This study aims to understand the role that reading motivation plays in middle school reading achievement (including achievement gaps) by analyzing the 2015 grade 8 NAEP reading data. The study focuses on identifying the unique effects of student-level reading motivation and aggregated school-level mean reading motivation on reading achievement. Hierarchical linear modeling is used to partition variability in student reading achievement into within- and between-school components after student- and school-level demographic variables are taken into account. In addition, this study investigates whether the identified unique effects of reading motivation on reading achievement vary by gender, race/ethnicity, English language learner status (ELL), and other demographic variables. Finally, the study examines the roles that students' demographic characteristics and reading motivation play in understanding reading achievement gaps based on students' race/ethnicity and ELL status Results show that student reading motivation is substantially associated with student reading achievement, even after taking into account student gender, race/ethnicity, and SES, ELL, IEP statuses, and interaction terms, which comports with the literature on the effects of reading motivation on reading achievement. In addition, the study identifies the unique and substantial effect of school-level mean motivation on school mean reading achievement even in the presence of other school demographic variables, which highlights the significant role schools might have on promoting students' academic development.

Correlation analysis has been used widely by researchers and analysts when analyzing large-scale assessment data. Limit research provided reliable methods to estimate various correlations and their standard errors with the complex sampling design and multiple plausible values taken into account. This report introduces the methodology used by the wCorr R package (Emad & Bailey, 2017) for computing the Pearson, Spearman, polyserial, and polychoric correlations, with and without weights applied. The methodology treats tetrachoric correlation as a specific case of the polychoric correlation and biserial correlation as a specific case of the polyserial correlation. Simulation evidence is presented to show correctness of the methods, including an examination of the bias and consistency.

The Teacher Compensation Survey (TCS) was a research and development effort by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to explore the possibility of developing an administrative records survey that would compile compensation and demographic data on all public school teachers in the nation. A pilot survey in 2007 collected data from seven states for school year (SY) 2005-06. The number of participating states increased in subsequent years, and by 2012, data were collected from 24 states for the 2010-11 school year. TCS was discontinued after the 2010-11 collection due to budget constraints. This report summarizes the results of the data collected for the 2007-08, 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. Limited resources prevented a more timely release of these data. While the data may be old, this report is being issued now because TCS afforded valuable lessons that are applicable to any similar, future collection efforts by NCES or by others seeking to gain a better understanding of issues related to teacher compensation. The purpose of this report is to describe both the potential of the collection and the practical problems encountered in the hopes that this will inform future survey efforts. In addition to any analytical value it may have, the TCS effort provides valuable lessons in collecting teacher compensation data. The analysis in section 3 looks closely at the problems encountered over three years of collecting TCS data and suggests ways these could be addressed.