Data SGP
Data sgp utilizes longitudinal student assessment data to produce statistical growth plots (SGPs) for each student, school, and district. The SGPs show each student’s learning in terms of relative progress as compared to their academic peers, and can be used to help determine whether students are making sufficient progress towards meeting an agreed-upon growth target.
The SGPs are calculated from a range of variables, including students’ test scores, grades, and years of study. These variables are transformed into scale scores before being displayed in a graph and are normalized to a common scale for ease of interpretation. The SGPs also display students’ prior test score histories and their current scores to allow users to identify patterns of performance over time.
When a teacher or parent evaluates student results, it is helpful for them to have context about how much learning has occurred relative to their academic peers. SGPs provide that information in percentile terms familiar to most educators and parents.
SGPs are based on the principle that a student’s relative progress is proportional to how close they come to achieving an achievement standard. SGPs are a powerful tool for assessing progress toward a particular goal and for monitoring the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve student performance.
The data sgp software allows users to analyze SGPs for students by grade level and content area in addition to districts, schools, and the state as a whole. The software also provides tools to analyze SGPs at the classroom, class, and student-level for research purposes.
There are two formats that SGP data is available in: WIDE format and LONG format. The software includes exemplar WIDE and LONG format data sets (sgptData_WIDE and sgptData_LONG) to assist in setting up the data for SGP analyses. In general, the lower level SGP functions (studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections) require the WIDE data format, while the higher level wrapper function, summarizeSGP, requires the LONG format.
Since the introduction of student growth as an assessment metric in 2008, median SGPs have been the primary summary tool for aggregating the growth of subgroups, classes, schools, and districts. However, a number of factors suggest that means should become the new primary summary tool for SGPs. This article presents the rationale for the change and describes the implications of this shift. In the future, all SGP summaries in the data sgp software will be calculated using means. This change will take place in the fall of 2019 for the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years and will be reflected in the SGP growth graphs available in the Data SGP dashboard. In addition, the sgpData_LONG data set will be updated to remove median SGPs for students in grade 9-11 and replace them with mean SGPs. This will align the department’s SGP summaries with our guiding philosophy that all students contribute to accountability results. In the future, we will also update our SGP reports and dashboards to reflect these changes. In addition, we will no longer publish median SGPs in our student profile/growth dashboard for grades 4 through 11. Please see the data sgp help file for more information.