This technical report on the National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP) 1996 State Assessment Program in Science provides an overview of the design, implementation and analysis of the educational assessment including details of sampling design, field administration, preliminary data analysis, and reporting of state results. This report also provides details on the background of the development of the 1996 instrument for science, sample design and selection, state and school cooperation, processing and scoring assessment materials, creation of the database and database products, weighting procedures and variance estimation, theoretical background and philosophy of NAEP scaling procedures, data analysis and scaling for the science assessment program, and conventions used in reporting the results. (DDR)