How to Get the Most Out of Data SGP
A key part of evaluating student achievement is having accurate data about students’ performance. The ability to compare student performance across schools, districts and states allows educators to identify trends and determine how best to address them. It can also help educators identify specific factors that may be influencing student achievement, such as the effect of family income or after-school programs. This is especially important if educators want to evaluate the effectiveness of programs or policies that have been implemented in their classrooms.
To get the most out of data sgp, you will need to have a computer that can run R, a free statistical computing program. The R Project website has links to download the software for various operating systems, including Windows and OSX. The sgpdata package included with the program allows you to load data into R and perform SGP analyses. It is necessary to load the data correctly in order for the analyses to work, and this guide will provide you with step-by-step instructions.
There are two data sets provided in the sgpdata package that can be used to test out SGP: sgpData_WIDE and sgpData_LONG. The former is an anonymized panel data set with five years of annual, vertically scaled assessments for each student; each row of the data contains a unique student identifier and the columns reflect time dependent variables related to that student’s assessment record. The latter is a similar data set but with an additional DATE variable that indicates the date associated with each student’s assessment record.
Using the data in the sgpdata package to perform SGP calculations is simple and straightforward. The lower level functions in the sgpdata package, such as studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections require WIDE formatted data whereas higher level wrapper functions (such as summarizeSGP) use the LONG data format. If you plan to run anything other than the most basic of SGP analyses, we strongly recommend formatting your data in the LONG format as it provides many preparation and storage benefits over WIDE.
In most cases, any errors that occur during the data analysis process will revert back to problems with data preparation so it is important to take care in making sure that your data is inputted correctly. SGP analyses are very sensitive to data preparation and are often difficult or impossible to complete properly if not done carefully.
Another important point about SGP is that it does not fully represent academic performance, especially for high school students. Students can have very good SGP scores but still have a low grade point average (GPA). This is because there are many factors that influence student achievement outside of the classroom, such as family income and after-school programs.
The goal of SGP is to highlight the most promising schools and districts based on their ability to improve students’ academic performance. The results from SGP can then be used to inform policies that can help teachers and students achieve more. For example, a school that has high student growth can focus its resources on improving its curriculum and instruction.