The purpose of the 2011 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Writing Framework is to describe how the new NAEP Writing Assessment is designed to measure students' writing at grades 4, 8, and 12. As the ongoing national indicator of the academic achievement of students in the United States, NAEP regularly collects information on representative samples of students in those three grades. Given expanding contexts for writing in the 21st century, the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework is designed to support the assessment of writing as a purposeful act of thinking and expression used to accomplish many different goals. Although NAEP cannot assess all contexts for student writing, the results of the 2011 NAEP Writing Assessment will offer new opportunities to understand students' ability to make effective choices in relation to a specified purpose and audience for their writing in an "on-demand" writing situation. In addition, the assessment results will provide important information about the role and impact of new technologies on writing in K-12 education and the extent to which students at grade 12 are prepared to meet postsecondary expectations. On the 2011 NAEP Writing Assessment, students will have the flexibility to make rhetorical choices that help shape the development and organization of ideas and the language of their responses. Using age- and grade-appropriate writing tasks, the assessment will evaluate writers' ability to achieve three purposes common to writing in school and in the workplace: "to persuade"; "to explain"; and "to convey experience, real or imagined". Because understanding the nature of one's audience is fundamental to successful communication, writing tasks will specify or clearly imply an audience, and writers will be asked to use approaches that effectively address that audience. This report contains the following chapters: (1) Overview; (2) Content of the 2011 NAEP Writing Assessment; (3) Design of the 2011 NAEP Writing Assessment; (4) Evaluation of Responses on the 2011 NAEP Writing Assessment; and (5) Reporting Results of the 2011 NAEP Writing Assessment. Appendices include: (1) Glossary of Terms; (2) Example Tasks; (3) Preliminary Holistic Scoring Guide for "To Persuade", "To Explain", and "To Convey Experience, Real or Imagined"; (4) 2011 NAEP Writing Preliminary Achievement Level Descriptions; (5) NAEP Writing Special Study; (6) 2011 NAEP Writing Assessment References; and (7) Organizations Contacted to Review Initial 2011 NAEP Writing Framework Recommendations. (Contains 18 exhibits.