National Center for Education Statistics, August 2001
This new report from the National Center for Education Statistics grows out of a special 1996 NAEP study of high school seniors enrolled in advanced biology, chemistry or physics, a population comprising almost one-quarter of U.S. twelfth graders in 1995-96. There is, of course, a ubiquitous problem with 12th grade NAEP results, namely that a lot of students don't take these low-stakes tests too seriously. Still, this is an interesting study, particularly for a country that has learned from TIMSS that even our advanced students don't perform very well by world standards. Some of what we find here is predictable: that boys still do better than girls in chemistry and physics, for example, though not significantly so in biology; and that white and Asian students score higher than black and Hispanic youngsters even within this advanced-course-taking population. Other results are less predictable, such as the absence of any significant public-private school differences. This 83-page report, written by Christine O'Sullivan and Wendy Grigg, does not report student performance in relation to the National Assessment Governing Board's "achievement levels" so it's hard to get beyond relativistic statements about students' actual attainments. But (in the mode of NAEP reports of yesteryear) it supplies a number of interesting sample items and tells you how well students did on each of them, as well as on NCES's pet "scale scores." If you want a hard copy, ask for NCES 2001-451 from Education Publications Center, U.S. Department of Education, P.O. Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794 or phone (877) 433-7827. Faster may be to surf to http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001451 and print yourself a copy from the PDF version you'll find there.
