Data sgp is a tool that allows educators to measure student growth and see how students are progressing. This is a valuable information to have because it helps teachers determine what they need to focus on for their students. It also provides a means of measuring teacher effectiveness. Many policymakers and practitioners favor SGPs over another popular statistical measurement of teacher effectiveness, value-added models (VAM). SGPs are easier to understand and retain the interpretability of percentile rankings.
SGPs are calculated for individual students based on the scores of the most recent assessment and at least one prior test from an earlier testing window. These tests do not need to be taken in the same year. SGPs are ranked against the performance of other students with similar score histories on the subject-matter tests. For example, a student with a SGP of 60 indicates that the student scored better than half of students with comparable score histories on the subject-matter test.
Unlike traditional test scores, SGPs are measured on a scale of 1-99. The higher the SGP, the more a student has grown. The average SGP statewide for a particular content area is approximately 50 (+/-1). SGPs are used to analyze growth at the school and district level and by subgroups within schools or districts.
In order to conduct SGP analyses, teachers and their administrators must have longitudinal student assessment data in the form of a file containing a time dependent record for each student. This requires appropriate software or hardware and some preparation time. However, once the files are ready, running the SGP calculations is fairly straightforward. In fact, most errors encountered in SGP analysis revert to problems in the data preparation process.
The sgpData_LONG and sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER are two exemplar longitudinal student assessment data sets that are available to use with SGP. The sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER contains an anonymized student-instructor lookup table that associates each students test record with the instructor associated with that student in each year of testing.
The sgpData_LONG dataset includes 7 variables that are required for SGP analyses: VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, YEAR, ID, SCALE_SCORE, GRADE and ACHIEVEMENT_LEVEL. The sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER dataset has an additional variable DATE that is only used when creating SGP aggregates by instructional group and not needed for SGP calculations. The lower level SGP functions, studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections, and higher level function wrappers for these functions all require LONG formatted data. Please see the SGP Data Analysis Vignette for more information on how to create and use these data sets.