Data SGP leverages longitudinal student assessment data to produce statistical growth plots (SGP) that reveal insights into students relative performance across academically similar peers – information that can help educators make informed instructional and curriculum decisions. SGPs are generated by integrating students standardized test scores with covariate information using an “growth standard”, established through prior testing history. As such, SGPs offer more accurate measurements of student progress than traditional percentiles.
Educators can use the SGP reports provided by their state to identify specific students who may need extra help in a certain subject or grade level. In addition to providing educators with a clear picture of how each student is performing, SGP allows teachers to track the progress of their classroom cohorts over time to determine whether they are making adequate gains towards their goal of college and career readiness.
SGP scores are reported on a 1-99 scale, with higher numbers indicating greater relative growth than lower ones. As a result, educators can quickly determine whether their students are growing more than, less than or about as much as expected. SGPs can also be compared between specific windows of time to measure student growth over the course of an entire school year, or can provide teachers and administrators with the most current SGP score available for each individual student as a quick check-in on the progression of a students SGP over a given period of time.
To support educators in the use of SGPs, some states will provide a spreadsheet of standardized test results that can be downloaded by teachers, along with more detailed sgpData reports containing a more complete set of assessment data for a given student. These spreadsheets provide educators with additional information such as the number of times a student has been tested and how many of those tests were administered by their teacher, as well as a more granular breakdown of the student’s SGP by content area and standardized test.
In addition to the SGP data, many states will provide a lookup table sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER which enables educators to easily associate a student’s test records with the teachers that administered them. This information is useful when determining whether or not the student’s teachers were effective in their instruction, as well as when comparing students’ SGP data between different schools and districts.
The sgpData package includes an example WIDE format data set sgpData to simulate the time dependent data used with lower level functions like studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections, but most higher level wrapper functions rely on long format data sets for operational analyses. This is because preparing and managing data in long format is generally simpler than converting WIDE data sets. As such, it is recommended that analysts consider utilizing long format data sets for all operational analyses. This is particularly true if the analyses will be conducted operationally, year after year.