ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the case of the United States’ National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading to illustrate how a large-scale assessment could be designed to account for the role of sociocultural influences on reading and reading comprehension. Written by reading and literacy scholars who contributed to the 2026 update of the NAEP Reading Framework, the chapter begins with a description of the historical context of NAEP assessments and descriptions of how pre-2026 changes in NAEP Reading and other large-scale assessments anticipated moves toward an assessment with a sociocultural perspective on reading. Next, the chapter describes the development of the 2026 NAEP Reading Framework, including efforts to advance sociocultural perspectives and the ways the adopted framework attended to some but not all these efforts. A last section discusses what remains to be done in terms of enhancing NAEP’s design of reading and other large-scale assessments that take a sociocultural perspective.
