Test results show
NAEP results: State posts its highest 4th-grade math score
that Florida was the only state where students scored higher on a national math exam last year, solving problems better than counterparts did two years earlier and making progress where the rest of the country remained in place.
Florida was the only state where students scored higher on a national math exam last year, solving problems better than counterparts did two years earlier and making progress where the rest of the country remained in place, according to results released this morning.
The Sunshine State in 2017 reversed some of the declines it witnessed in middle-school math in 2015 and posted its highest ever fourth-grade math score, the results showed. Florida also was one of nine states that showed gains on the reading exam given as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.
“Something very good is happening in Florida, obviously,” said Peggy Carr, associate commissioner of assessment at the National Center for Education Statistics, during a telephone call with reporters ahead of the release. “Florida needs to be commended.”
Carr said she could not explain Florida’s gains but called them interesting and notable. Researchers spliced the data — by race, family income, gender and whether youngsters had disabilities — and found Florida students showed growth on the 2017 NAEP, where most other states did not.
Dubbed the “nation’s report card,” NAEP exams are meant to be a “common yardstick” to measure student academic performance across the country. Every two years, they are given to a sampling of students in each state. Last year, students at six Orange County middle schools and two elementary schools, for example, took part.
Nationally, average scores for fourth- and eighth-graders on math didn’t change from 2015, nor did scores for fourthgraders in reading. The average eighth-grade math score, however, went up from two years earlier. NAEP was first given in the early 1990s, and nationwide scores were higher in 2017 than they were back then, despite a few changes recently.
The results from the tests that aim to show “what American kids know and can do” will be discussed at an event Washington, D.C., later today, with Florida Education Commissioner Pam Stewart and Alberto Carvalho, Miami-Dade County’s superintendent, among the scheduled speakers.
The Florida Department of Education declined to make anyone available to discuss then-embargoed results Monday.
Sample questions show students taking NAEP exams tackle both relatively easy and more challenging items. A tough fourth-grade problem required students to compare fractions, showing whether they were greater, equal to or less than a given fraction, for example. A difficult eight-grade reading question asked students to read a passage and then explain the two types of evidence the author used to bolster her argument.
The results are from math and reading exams given to fourthand eighth-graders in public schools. In 2017, for the first time, the NAEP exams were given on computer tablets instead of with paper and pencil.
Louisiana’s state superintendent, in a March letter to Carr, suggested the switch to computerbased tests could hurt states such as his, where state exams aren’t online and youngsters may have limited access to computers at home, as first reported by Chalkbeat, an online education news organization.
But Carr and other NAEP officials said the organization, after running studies on results of both paper and computer testing, corrected for any differences and was releasing scores as solid as in the past.
“We’re confident these results are valid and are apple to apple results from our states and the nation,” said Bill Bushaw, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board.
Typically, NAEP does not include data for school districts or schools, but in recent years, some large urban districts have participated in what are called NAEP trials. Twenty-seven districts participated in 2017, among them Florida school districts in Duval and Miami-Dade counties. Both showed “significant improvements” in math, Carr said.
Florida’s gains in math showed more fourth-graders earning a “proficient” or better score, meaning “competency over challenging subject matter,” and fewer earning a score below “basic,” meaning they didn’t have even partial mastery of fundamental skills, than in 2015.
The fourth-grade score on the math test — 246 out of 500— was four points higher than in 2015 and the highest Florida has posted since its students first took that NAEP exam in 1992.
The percentage of Florida fourth-graders proficient or better on NAEP math was 48 percent, compared with the national figure of 40 percent. Massachusetts led the country at 53 percent proficient or better.
Puerto Rico was the only other jurisdiction to make gains on that math test.
On the eighth-grade math exam, Florida students also gained four points, making up for some of the six-point drop the state’s eighth-graders showed in 2015. More eighth-graders scored proficient or better compared with 2015, and fewer did very poorly. The state’s eighth-graders still lagged the nation, however, with 29 percent at least proficient compared with 33 percent nationwide and 50 percent in topranked Massachusetts.
The Department of Defense schools were the only ones besides Florida’s to show gains on the eighth-grade math exam.
On the fourth-grade reading test, Florida’s fourth-graders showed no significant score changes, but they remained ahead of the nation, as they have been for more than a decade. Forty-one percent of the state’s fourthgraders were proficient or better, compared with 35 percent for the nation.
On the eighth-grade reading test, the state’s students scored three points higher in 2017 compared with 2015 and were right on target with counterparts nationwide. In both Florida and the nation, 35 percent of eighth-graders scored proficient or better on the reading test.