Setting Standards and Interpreting Achievement: A Cautionary Tale from the National Assessment of Educational Progress

Current reforms call for the establishment of clear performance standards for students (or schools), and the results of large-scale assessments are increasingly reported in terms of the percentages of students reaching a small number of standards. A crucial question is whether standards-based reporting will be accurately interpreted by the nontechnical audiences-such as the press, policymakers, and the public-that are among the most important consumers of assessment results. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has recently attempted standards-based reporting using its three "achievement levels" for mathematics. In addition, the National Assessment of Educational Progress's more traditional reporting in terms of "anchor points," although based on the distribution of student performance rather than a priori expectations, raises issues similar to those posed by standards-based reporting. In this study, we explored the use of achievement levels and anchor points in press reports of the 1990 National Assessment of Educational Progress mathematics assessment. We found widespread oversimplification and frequent misinterpretations, some of which appear to have stemmed from standards-based reporting. Implications for future standards-based reporting are explored.