This policy research document is intend¬ed for New Mexico policymakers to use when examining possible changes to the state assessment’s alignment with the National Assessment of Educational Prog¬ress (NAEP). The 2009 NAEP test is not yet in existence, so the purpose of this report is to give policymakers a headstart in determining where they might, if they so decide, begin to make changes in their assessment standards and specifications to develop an assessment system more closely aligned with that used for the NAEP. Overall, reviewers found New Mexico’s sci¬ence assessment framework to be fairly well aligned with the NAEP framework. For grade 4, all NAEP content items are to some degree addressed by New Mexico’s science assess-ment framework, with no ratings of 1 and an overall alignment rating of 2.2 (a rating of 1 indicates no alignment and a rating of 3, full alignment). For grade 8 the majority of NAEP content statements are partially aligned with the content in the New Mexico science as¬sessment framework, and the overall align¬ment rating is 2.1, mostly because the NAEP standards typically contain more detail and more specific content than the corresponding New Mexico standards. In the comparison with NAEP grade 12, New Mexico was given an overall alignment rating of 2.3, indicating a fairly high degree of alignment; only two NAEP content statements are not addressed by corresponding New Mexico standards. A rating of partial alignment between New Mexico and the NAEP was due primarily to reviewers finding that the state often implied content that was stated explicitly by the NAEP and that the NAEP often provided more spe¬cific content items or more detail. However, reviewers believed that New Mexico was, on the whole, fairly well aligned with the NAEP.