{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02623688155922039, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01424287856071964, 'mean_word_length': 4.784682080924855, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The NAEP Geography Report 2010: What Will We Do Next?

Roger M. Downs is a professor of geography and former head of the Department of Geography at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA. He teaches undergraduate courses in human geography, human spatial behavior, and urban geography, as well as graduate courses in research design and geography education. Dr. Downs has been involved in the development of the National Geography Standards and was a member of the 2010 NAEP Geography Development Committee. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rightly calls itself the Nation’s Report Card. As the gold standard of educational assessment, it offers a picture of what U.S. students know and can do in a subject. There have been NAEP Geography assessments in 1994, 2001, and 2010. The next assessment is planned for 2014. Before reacting to this trio of portraits, we, as geography educators, need to remember what NAEP is and is not, what NAEP can and cannot do. NAEP is a federally-funded program of the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and falls under the aegis of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB). NAEP’s mandate is restricted to reporting on the state of knowledge of U.S. students so that Congress can develop policies. NAEP is enjoined to tell it like it is but not to argue why particular things did or did not happen. NAEP is, therefore, a description, not an explanation of the state of affairs. So what are the characteristics of a NAEP Report? First, within the limits of assessment in general, it is a credible picture because of the use of Item Response Theory (IRT) and the powerful sampling design. For each report, there were approximately 10,000 students participating at each of grades 4, 8, and 12. The sample size and design allows NAEP to generalize with reasonable confidence about what students know and can do. Second, unlike subjects such as mathematics and English that are tested annually, we have only three broad-brush portraits taken at varying intervals that depict the nation as a whole. Unlike some other subjects, we cannot look below the national to the state scale. It is possible to disaggregate results on the basis of categories such as urban and suburban, but we are constrained in what we can say about the geography of geography education. Third, NAEP questions are based on a framework with organizing dimensions for content and cognition. There are three categories to the content dimension— space and place, environment and society, and spatial dynamics and connections— and three categories to the cognitive dimension—knowing, understanding, and applying. The framework was written in 1992, prior to the 1994 publication of the National Geography Standards. In an ideal world, the standards would have been written before the assessment. Fortunately, many people who worked on the framework also worked on the standards and so they are reasonably well-aligned. So what do these three reports do for us? As media coverage in late July 2011 demonstrated, NAEP Reports command national attention. The report was covered by most major newspapers, in print and online. Editorials and blogs made use of the results. But attention was fleeting and the results were quickly subsumed under the rubric of social studies, combining the geography results with those of civics and history, whose reports were issued a few weeks earlier. As my commentary attests, the major geography organizations are covering the results and people are coming away with the message that while there was modest improvement, there was little to celebrate. As I noted in the NAEP-sponsored webinar releasing the results, “. . . the overall pattern of student performance in the 2010 NAEP Geography Report shows improvements since 2001 at grade 4, no change at grade 8, and a slight decline at grade 12. This pattern reflects the status of geography in America’s schools. Geography is taught as part of social