The purpose of this book is to evaluate a new approach to the analysis and reporting of the large-scale surveys for the National Assessment of Educational Progress carried out for the National Center for Education Statistics. The need for a new approach was driven by the demands for secondary analysis of the survey data by researchers who needed analyses more detailed than those published by NCES, and the need to accelerate the processing and publication of results from the surveys.

This new approach is based on a full multilevel statistical and psychometric model for students' responses to the test items, taking into account the design of the survey, the backgrounds of the students, and the classes, schools and communities in which the students were located. The authors detail a fully integrated single model that incorporates both the survey design and the psychometric model by extending the traditional form of the psychometric model to accommodate the design structure while allowing for student, teacher, and school covariates.