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School Sorting and Sample Selection in the 2000 State Assessment

The state NAEP school sampling frame undergoes a systematic sorting before school sampling begins. This sorting ensures that the sampled schools represent a variety of population subgroups. The sorting variables, listed in their hierarchical sort order, are as follows:

  • small or large district status,
  • small or large school size class,
  • urbanization classification,
  • minority enrollment classification, and
  • achievement data or median household income.

For each participating jurisdiction, a sample of schools comes from the sorted school sampling frame, and each school's probability of selection is proportional to its measure of size.

The table below shows the mean, minimum, and maximum number of schools sampled by grade and school type within the 2000 state assessment's participating jurisdictions.

Mean, minimum, and maximum number of schools sampled, by grade, state assessment: 2000
Schools Mean number of sampled schools Minimum number of sampled schools Maximum number of sampled schools
Fourth-grade schools 112 22 209
Eighth-grade schools 99 7 150
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2000.
Last updated 17 June 2008 (MH)

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