NAEP Validity Panel (NVP)
The National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP)—the Nation's Report Card—is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas. AIR manages the NAEP Validity Panel (NVP), which provides the National Center for Education Statistics with independent evaluations of the quality of NAEP’s operational procedures and the validity of NAEP scores.
The NVP builds on AIR’s legacy of maintaining the NAEP Validity Studies Panel and the NAEP Delivery and Technology Panel. It considers both procedural and empirical validity evidence to assess and help improve the degree to which NAEP scores reflect what students know and can do in core academic subjects at the national, state, district, and subgroup levels.
NAEP 2026 Assessments
For the NAEP 2026 mathematics and reading assessments, the NVP will conduct evaluations that include the following topics:
- Psychometric analyses including calibration, scaling, and linking;
- Alignment of item pools with the 2026 mathematics and reading frameworks;
- Psychometric analyses on how changes to the item pool from the transition to the 2026 mathematics and reading frameworks affect linking between the 2024 and 2026 assessments and trend reporting;
- Representativeness of school and student samples;
- Accuracy and reliability of constructed-response items scoring, including both hand scoring and automated scoring (for reading); and
- Design and the results of the 2026 bridge studies, which examine the potential effects of the NAEP’s administration transition from exclusively NAEP-provided Chromebooks to a combination of NAEP-provided Chromebooks and qualified school-provided devices.
The results of the evaluations will be summarized by the Panel Chair in a public-facing report.
Panel Membership
The panel is comprised of leading experts with deep technical and operational assessment, sampling, and psychometric expertise:
- Andreas Oranje, Panel Chair, RTI
- Derek Briggs, University of Colorado Boulder
- Catherine Close, Renaissance Learning
- Karla Egan, EdMetric
- Eugenio Gonzalez, TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, Boston College
- Don Jang, NORC
- Rochelle Michel, Smarter Balanced
- Denny Way, College Board (retired)
