2009 NAEP High School Transcript Study

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) HSTS is a periodic survey that provides educational professionals, such as administrators, policymakers, and researchers, with information regarding high school graduates’ coursetaking patterns and grade point averages (GPAs). It can also be used to provide information on the relationship of graduate coursetaking patterns to achievement as measured by NAEP, which is an ongoing, periodic assessment of educational achievement in U.S. schools. The transcript studies serve as a barometer for changes in high school graduates’ coursetaking patterns. For HSTS 2009, complete transcripts were collected from May 2009 through October 2009 for 37,600 students who graduated in 2009 from a nationally representative sample of U.S. public and private high schools. HSTS 2009 was conducted in conjunction with NAEP 2009 twelfth-grade mathematics and science assessments. A description and results of this study can be found on the NAEP home page at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/.

HSTS 2009 is conducted in conjunction with NAEP 2009. HSTS 2009 was designed to allow an analysis of the coursetaking patterns of graduates who graduated from U.S. public and private high schools in 2009. It was further designed so that data on graduates’ coursetaking patterns can be linked to the NAEP 2009 assessment results. NAEP provides results about subject-matter achievement, instructional experiences, and school environment, and reports these results for populations of students (e.g., 12th-graders) and selected subgroups of those populations (e.g., male students). Changes in the relationship of HSTS coursetaking to NAEP performance can also be examined by looking at similar studies in 1994, 1998, 2000, and 2005.