Who Took the 1997 Arts Assessment?The NAEP 1997 arts assessment was conducted nationally at grade 8. The arts assessment was only administered at grade 8 because, due to budgetary constraints, NAEP could not comprehensively assess the arts at grades 4, 8, and 12. For music and visual arts, representative samples of public and nonpublic school students were assessed. The theatre sample, however, was a "targeted" sample. NAEP identified schools offering at least 44 classroom hours of a theatre course (including more than the history or literature of theatre) per semester. Students attending these schools who had accumulated 30 hours of theatre classes by the end of the 1996-97 school year were selected to take the theatre assessment. Results of the 1995 field test in dance indicated that too few schools offered dance instruction at grade 8 to obtain a nationally representative sample of dance-educated students. Based on these findings, members of the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Assessment Governing Board, and representatives from the dance community recommended that a targeted sample of grade 8 students complete the dance assessment. However, because a student sample of sufficient size and distribution could not be located, the grade 8 dance assessment was not administered. NAEP does not, and is not designed to, report on the performance of individual students. Instead, it assesses specific populations of in-school students or subgroups of these populations, for example, male and female students, black and white students, and students in different regions of the country. Samples are selected using a complex sampling design.
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