A nationwide drop in math performance this year on the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP exams spurred questions about whether the Common Core Learning Standards were to blame. A new study by the American Institutes of Research shows that the questions on the NAEP test actually aligned quite closely with new Common Core math standards, although there were uneven matches across some content areas.

Researchers Phil Daro of Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute, Gerunda B. Hughes of Howard University and Fran Stancavage of the American Institutes for Research, working with 18 math educators, supervisors and mathematicians, found that 79 percent of NAEP items in 4th-grade math were covered in the Common Core standards at Grade 4 or below. Conversely, 77 percent of 3rd- and 4th-grade Common Core content was tested on NAEP with at least one question.

The 4th-grade math areas where the alignment was weakest were data analysis, statistics and probability, with a match rate of only 47 percent, and algebra and geometry, where the match rate was 62 and 68 percent, respectively.

In 8th grade, the researchers found an even stronger alignment between NAEP and the Common Core standards. Eighty-seven percent of NAEP test questions were associated with at least one Common Core standard. In the reverse direction, however, researchers found that 42 percent of Common Core content was not tested by any items on the 2015 8th-grade NAEP math test. In algebra, 13 of the 32 Common Core standards had no questions on the 8th-grade NAEP and half of the Common Core standards for middle school ratio and proportion topics also were not tested on NAEP.

The researchers said most of the mismatches they uncovered reflected an instructional shift in the Common Core standards, which delays instruction in certain topics to later grades. They advised the NAEP Governing Board to review its math framework to work toward a closer alignment with what students are learning at the relevant grades.