Findings and Recommendations from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2017 Pilot Study of the Middle School Transcript Study (MSTS). Methodological Report. NCES 2019-031

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2017 pilot study of the Middle School Transcript Study (MSTS) is the first NAEP transcript study to focus on the middle school level, collect student coursetaking data at the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) level, and rely solely on the electronic submission of course catalogs and student transcripts. The purposes of this pilot study were to evaluate the feasibility of providing middle school student coursetaking data that link to the NAEP assessment data and contextual questionnaire data, to provide coursetaking measures and analyses that focus on issues relevant at the middle school level, and to explore the use of electronic school record collections as the data delivery system for future transcript studies. This pilot study was conducted in three major stages: (1) recruitment; (2) data collection and course coding; and (3) analysis and reporting. It was limited to large urban districts, referred to as the TUDA jurisdictions, to help evaluate and streamline operations for potential future NAEP TUDA-based middle or high school transcript studies, as well as other electronic data-based transcript studies. The participation in this study was strictly voluntary for TUDA jurisdictions. TUDA jurisdictions who volunteered to participate agreed to submit information for all eighth-grade students enrolled in the schools sampled for the NAEP 2017 TUDA-based mathematics and reading assessments.