DATA SGP is the collection of aggregated student performance data collected over time that teachers and administrators use to make decisions about instruction and assessment. SGP is comprised of individual-level measures like test scores and growth percentiles as well as aggregated measures at the classroom, school and district levels including class size, attendance rates and graduation rates.
SGP allows educators to understand how students perform on a variety of academic assessments over time, which can help them identify areas for improvement, inform classroom practices, evaluate schools/districts and support broader research initiatives. The primary benefit of SGP is that it provides a more accurate measure of student achievement over time than traditional metrics like mean, median and mode scores.
To calculate SGP, the state’s web portal uses a variety of software tools to identify trends and patterns within a student’s longitudinal data set. The resulting analysis is a series of graphical reports that display the student’s performance across a variety of indicators, including assessment scores, growth percentiles and achievement levels.
These graphical reports are accessible from the state’s web portal by choosing a student and selecting the “SGP Report” tab. Educators can also access more detailed SGP data by selecting a student in the report and choosing the “SGP Data” tab, which includes the student’s SGP data in a spreadsheet format.
A student’s SGP score indicates how much a student has grown relative to their academic peers. For example, a student with a growth score of 75 means that the student has grown higher than about 75% of their academic peers. A student with a lower SGP score may need additional support, while a student with a high growth score is likely to maintain their current level of academic achievement or improve further.
In addition to providing a visual representation of a student’s progress, SGP data also offers educators the ability to see how a particular student is doing in comparison to their peers, both in the state and nationally. This information can be useful for identifying students who may require extra support as well as helping to differentiate classroom instruction for high-performing students and tracking the progress of students who are struggling.
However, the SGP process is complex and requires sophisticated statistical software (R) that can be challenging for newcomers to learn. As a result, the sgpdata tool is designed to simplify the SGP analysis process and provide an easy-to-use interface for users who are unfamiliar with R or statistical software in general. The tool can be used by individuals or groups, is available for both Windows and Mac OSX, and can be downloaded from our GitHub page. While the tool was developed specifically for educational assessment, it can be used to analyze any type of data that is available in a spreadsheet format. The tool is free to download and can be run either from the command line or as a Python script. The user guide that is provided with the tool outlines the basic steps for using the application and includes numerous resources for getting started.
