Kentucky’s new NAEP Science scores look flat

New results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science assessment for 2015 have finally been released.

Even the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) admits the results overall look “flat.”

When we look at the overall proficiency rates for “all students” for the eighth grade NAEP science assessment, we get the results shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

g8-science-all-students-ky-and-nation-2009-to-2015

Notice that the national Grade 8 NAEP science proficiency shows a statistically significant improvement between 2015 and the earlier years. Kentucky’s performance does not show statistically significant improvement.

The KDE news release also says overall Kentucky’s average score is above the national average. That is true when you look at the NAEP Scale Score results. Kentucky scored 157 on this 300-point assessment while the national average was 153, a statistically significant difference.

However, when you consider the proficiency rate differences in 2015 between Kentucky and the national public school average, the two-point differential shown in Figure 1 is not statistically significantly different.

That is important because back in 2009 the five-point differential in proficiency rates favoring Kentucky was statistically significantly different.

In other words, Kentucky lost ground relative to the rest of the nation since 2009 if we are talking about getting more kids all the way to proficiency in science.

Differences are also narrowing if we look at the scale scores for 2009 and 2015. In 2009 Kentucky scored seven points above the national public school average. In 2015 that was cut to only a four-point lead.

So far, we’ve only discussed the overall “all student” scores, but our regular readers know you have to disaggregate NAEP scores by race before you really start understanding what is happening. If you only look at all student average scores, you compare a lot of Kentucky white students to kids from other races elsewhere who generally score lower on tests.

So, Figure 2 shows the white students only performance in 2015.

Figure 2

g8-science-white-students-ky-and-nation-2009-to-2015

Here we see Kentucky’s whites are definitely behind the national average. Worse, the gap between Kentucky’s whites’ science proficiency rates and the national average is growing.

Also note that the increase in national average proficiency rates for whites over time has been statistically significant. That, again, is not true for Kentucky’s proficiency rates.

The situation looks even more disturbing when we compare scores for black students in Figure 3.

Figure 3

g8-science-black-students-ky-and-nation-2009-to-2015

Because of larger sample sizes across the nation, the national public school black proficiency rate rise from eight points to 11 points between 2009 and 2011 is statistically significant.

Kentucky’s blacks’ NAEP Grade 8 Science proficiency rate decline, though even larger in magnitude, is not considered statistically significant because Kentucky’s results have a fairly large amount of statistical sampling error. However, the constant trend of decay shown in Figure 3 coupled with the astonishingly low black science proficiency rate for Kentucky as of 2015 provides plenty of reason for concern.

The bottom line here is the 2015 NAEP Grade 8 Science results don’t create optimism.

It is way too early to lay this stagnation at the feet of the new Next Generation Science Standards, which Kentucky adopted in 2013 over legislator protest, but it certainly isn’t a good sign, either.

Tech Note:

NAEP scores were assembled with the NAEP Data Explorer. The Data Explorer's statistical significance tools were used to determine significant differences.