ABSTRACT
In this article, I discuss ways in which reporting National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results in terms of a market basket of tasks would affect achievement-level reporting. After reviewing current NAEP reporting and achievement-level setting procedures, 3 market-basket variations are described. Ways in which achievement-level standards would be set, interpreted, and validated are then discussed. The conclusions are as follows: (a) the structure of the market-basket reporting scale can be exploited to simplify a key step in the standard-setting process, namely mapping item- or booklet-level judgments to the reporting scale; (b) the more transparent meaning of market-basket scores, in contrast to scaled scores and behavioral descriptions, clarifies the limitations of NAEP performances as evidence about the range of student proficiencies and accomplishments that the public’s and educators’ interests may span; and (c) market-basket reporting approaches that enable individual students to take a full market-basket set of items simplify data-gathering and analysis for validity studies of achievement-level set-points and interpretations.
