An Exploration of Opportunity to Learn and Implications for NAEP

Sheila W. Valencia, University of Washington, James W. Pellegrino, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Richard P. Durán, University of California, Santa Barbara

This paper provides the National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment Governing Board, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) community with insights from research on Opportunity to Learn (OTL) and implications for the design, reporting, and interpretation of NAEP subject-matter results. Understanding the learning opportunities afforded to students from diverse backgrounds and those who underperform on NAEP is essential to understanding student performance and providing equitable teaching and learning experiences.

The NAEP program collects background information associated with its assessments through teacher, student, and school questionnaires. While some of that information aligns with indicators of OTL (e.g. classroom resources, teacher quality, content coverage, classroom organization), the focus of this paper is to expand NAEPs thinking about OTL beyond those to include indicators of instructional quality that are closer to actual instruction-learning interactions in classrooms.  The authors examine research on the social, cognitive, and cultural nature of classroom learning as well as current approaches and recommendations for collecting OTL information from large-scale assessments and new NAEP curriculum frameworks. They offer suggestions for the development, collection, and use of OTL information in the NAEP program and its importance to understanding educational progress for all segments of the student population.