Data sgp is a set of aggregated student performance data collected over time that teachers and administrators use to better understand student achievement and growth. It includes individual-level information like test scores and growth percentiles as well as aggregated measures at the school/district level including class size, attendance rates and graduation rates. Educators and administrators use this data to identify areas of strength and weakness in their students’ progress, inform classroom instruction, support student learning objectives (SLOs) and evaluate schools/districts.
Student Growth Percentiles (SGP) provide a common measure of student academic achievement by comparing a student’s assessed score on a state assessment to the scores of their academic peers. A student’s SGP is a number between 85 and 99 that tells us how much the student has grown from their last assessment. A student’s SGP can be used to inform classroom practice, support SLO development, evaluate teachers/schools/districts and support broader research initiatives.
SGP analyses are straightforward once the data is properly prepared and a few key decisions have been made. Any problems that arise during the process usually revert back to issues with the data or to errors in the preparation of the SGP analyses themselves. The SGPdata package, which is available from CRAN, contains exemplar WIDE and LONG formatted data sets to assist in setting up the data for the various SGP analyses.
To run a SGP analysis one must have a computer running the R statistical software environment. The R software is available for Windows, OSX and Linux and is open source with many online resources to help get new users started. The SGPdata package is designed to work with educational assessment data but it can be used for any kind of statistical data analysis.
Creating a SGP summary report in Excel is relatively simple and can be done in a few steps. The first step is to prepare the data by creating a spreadsheet that includes all of the data points for each student in the system. This is easily done by selecting all of the cells in the sheet and choosing the Data > Format as Data table option from the Insert menu.
The next step is to create the tables that will be used for the SGP analysis. For a single student there will be a data table for each of the 5 years that they have been tested. These tables will contain variables such as ID, SS_2013, SS_2014, SS_2015, and SS_2016.
The final step is to create a column in each of these tables that will include the SGP result for that student. The resulting columns will then be combined to form the SGP summary report. Educators can access the resulting spreadsheet by selecting a student in a Star report and choosing the SGP data tab. This report is a useful tool for communicating to stakeholders that proficiency targets must be achieved over a multi-year period. It also serves as an effective way to communicate that schools are making good progress towards achieving their goals and objectives.