Data SGP – A New Way to Understand Student Achievement Over Time
Data sgp is a new way to understand student achievement over time. It shows a student’s progress relative to other students with similar prior test scores (their academic peers). It can help teachers identify areas for improvement, inform classroom instruction and support educator evaluation systems. Using longitudinal assessment data, SGP models estimate latent achievement trait models alongside historical test score histories to calculate student growth percentiles and projections. SGP stands out among other growth measures in that it allows educators to establish official proficiency targets/goals for schools based on the state achievement goals. This helps communicate to educators and other stakeholders that proficiency must be achieved within a specified time frame while providing an alternative approach to measuring student achievement if the traditional assessment is insufficient for judging teacher effectiveness.
To use data sgp, educators can download the more detailed sgpData spreadsheet from their summary report. This spreadsheet displays a student’s SGP percentiles for each of the five years they have been tested. It also includes additional information about the student, such as gender and socioeconomic status, that is not available in the summary report.
The sgpData spreadsheet is in WIDE format, which is the standard file format for SGP analysis. This is a common format for longitudinal data sets, where each case/row represents one student and the columns represent different variables associated with that student at various points in time. The sgpData_long version of the data set is also compatible with SGP analyses and serves as an exemplar of how to format data for use with SGP’s lower level studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections functions.
Educators can access this spreadsheet by selecting a student in their summary report and choosing the “SGP Data” tab. The first column, ID, provides the unique student identifier and the next 5 columns provide the student’s assessment score for each of the five years they have been testing. In some cases, a student does not have five years of assessed data and these columns will display missing values (NA).
SGP uses a statistical software program called R. This is an open source platform that supports a wide range of statistical analysis. It has a user friendly interface and extensive online resources to assist newcomers in learning how to use it.
To get started with SGP, educators must have access to longitudinal student assessment data in a common format such as WIDE or long data sets. A common tool for this is the open source data analysis software R, which has a user friendly interface and extensive online documentation. The SGP package for R is an ideal tool to analyze this data, as it can be easily automated and has many features specific to educational assessment analysis. The SGP package can be downloaded for free and there are many online resources to help newcomers learn how to use it.