Weight Calibration across Subject-Specific Samples in the National Assessment of Educational Progress

• Activity Number: 358
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Jennifer Kali*+ and Tom Krenzke and Keith Rust and John Burke
• Companies: Westat and Westat and Westat and Westat
• Keywords: Survey estimation ; consistency of estimates

Abstract

Conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a periodic assessment of student academic achievement which produces estimates at both the national and state level. Subsamples of the selected students are assigned to subjects such as mathematics and reading, and weighted totals of each subsample estimate the size of the student population. Previous standard weighting procedures for NAEP resulted in minor discrepancies in distributions of weight totals across demographic subgroups, between subjects. Raking (Iterative Proportional Fitting) was implemented in 2009 to eliminate the discrepancies in the demographic distributions. Subject specific weights were raked to sample-based population estimates from the entire sample. An evaluation was conducted to investigate the impact on the assessment means and standard errors.