NISS studied how to conduct data swapping, one of a number of techniques meant to distort confidentiality-threatening high-dimensional characteristics of a database while preserving non-threatening low-dimensional characteristics. Data swapping exchanges attribute values between records. The issues to be studied are selection of the swapping rate, of attributes to be swapped and of candidate data records for swapping.
Working through the Education Statistics Services Institute-Statistics (ESSI-Stat) and NAEP Education Statistics Services Institute (NESSI), NISS has convened a series of task forces to bring nationwide expertise to bear on problems of importance to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
NISS was hired by the NAEP to develop new statistical methods to analyze complex surveys in the field of education. NISS developed more effective designs for answering basic questions facing education policy. A group of researchers including statisticians, psychometricians, and education researchers examined existing data sets and focused on issues related to national educational performance and its connections to demographic characteristics of students. They explored general issues in simultaneous and casual interpretation.
