Data SGP For Educators
Data SGP provides educators with tools to help them understand student achievement trends and pinpoint areas for improvement within classrooms. By giving them a picture of student progress, teachers can tailor their instruction to meet students where they are at and get them on the path toward meeting official state achievement goals.
Using the Data SGP package requires the use of the free, open source software program R. R is available for Windows, OSX and Linux and there are many resources to assist new users with installing and getting familiar with the tool. Almost all errors associated with SGP analyses revert back to issues with data preparation so we strongly encourage you to spend time making sure that your data is set up correctly before running any SGP calculations.
The data sets included in the SGP package are intended to provide an example of how to set up your own longitudinal assessment data for SGP analysis. The lower level functions that do the actual SGP calculations, studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections, require WIDE formatted data. However, higher level wrapper functions like sgpData and sgpData_long (which are designed to work with LONG formatted data) are also provided. The higher level data sets provide the capability to incorporate embedded SGPstateData meta-data into your long data files which makes it even easier to run operational analyses.
SGP uses statistical growth standards to compare a student’s test scores with those of their academic peers across the country. This provides a clear, visual representation of a student’s growth and indicates how much additional growth is needed to reach or maintain proficiency. This method of analysis differs from traditional percentile scores because it looks at a student’s performance with respect to their academic peers and allows for more accurate depictions of a student’s growth.
In order to generate a student’s SGP, standardized test scores from a series of years are aggregated and compared against official state achievement targets/goals for the grade level. The data sgp package takes the aggregated results from each year and then identifies the percentage of students who have met or exceeded the target score. This percentage represents the number of students that are “inside the curve” compared to the total population of students in their grade level and is an important indicator of whether or not students are on track to meet state achievement goals.
SGP stands out from standard growth models and other methods because it identifies the specific student/teacher combination that generated each of the final results. This allows schools and districts to easily see the impact of each teacher on student achievement. It also gives educators an idea of the amount of growth that each student will need to meet or exceed their official state target score. This information is critical for determining which students are on track to meet their goal and for planning effective instructional strategies to accelerate the learning of those that need it. However, SGP should not be used as the sole metric when making educational decisions and teachers should consider student SGPs in conjunction with other standardized measures of performance.