IDENTIFIERS *National Assessment of Educational Progress

The extent to which National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Executive Summary reports are intelligible to policy makers and educators was studied, and recommendations were offered for improving NAEP reporting practices. Detailed interviews were conducted with 59 policy makers and educators. In general, these two groups had considerable difficulty with the presentation of results in the Executive Summary report they were given. Misunderstandings and mistakes in reading the NAEP report were common. Many of the people interviewed had limited prior exposure to the NAEP, were unfamiliar with its reporting scale, and had a limited knowledge of statistics. These shortcomings contributed substantially to the problems encountered in reading the Executive Summary reports. Several recommendations are offered for report improvement. First, all displays of data should be field tested prio