A student’s data sgp is an important part of their educational record that helps educators better understand students’ learning and performance over time. This information can be used to identify areas for improvement, inform classroom practices and support educator evaluation systems.
Student Growth Percentiles (SGP) are a measure of student achievement that is based on longitudinal test score history and uses latent achievement trait models to estimate growth standards using a range of covariates. SGPs are a more accurate measure of student achievement than traditional metrics like mean, median and mode scores and provide more insight into individual and class-wide trends.
SGPs also allow schools and districts to link teacher/student performance to official state achievement targets/goals which cannot be done via standard growth models or other methods. This serves to help motivate teachers by linking their performance against measurable goals and allowing districts/schools to better communicate the need for proficiency within a specified timeframe.
Educators can use SGPs to identify students in need of additional support, differentiate classroom instruction for high performing students and assess the effectiveness of their teaching strategies. SGPs can also be used to help meet the needs of struggling learners through targeted intervention efforts that target the specific areas where they are falling behind.
To calculate SGPs, a teacher’s data file contains their students’ cumulative test scores for all assessments administered to them and the corresponding growth percentile for each assessment. Teachers can then compare their students’ SGPs against those of their peers to see how they are progressing toward their goals.
For example, if a student’s SGP for the current year indicates that they are at or above their grade level SGP, this means that they are making adequate growth. However, if a student’s SGP indicates that they are below their grade level SGP it indicates that they need more than average growth to make up for this deficit.
A student’s SGP is measured on a scale of 1 to 99 and is interpreted like a percentile rank where lower numbers indicate lower relative growth and higher numbers indicate greater relative growth. For instance, a student’s SGP of 75 indicates that they are growing faster than 75% of academically similar students.
The data sgp vignette shows how to set up an SGP analysis using the sgpdata tool from the R package. This vignette assumes that the SGPdata tool has been used to create data files with WIDE format, which is a data format supported by the lower level functions (studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections) but most of the higher level wrapper functions (including studentGrowthSummary and studentGrowthPlots) require the use of LONG format for operational analyses.
The sgpdata tool provides a convenient way to manage the SGP data for operational use. It is recommended that schools and districts format their data into this form if they plan on running SGP analyses operationally year after year as it can simplify the preparation, storage and management of the data.