Data sgp is a set of aggregated data collected over time that provides educators and families with a more complete picture of student learning and achievement. It includes information on student-level metrics like test scores and growth percentiles, as well as aggregated measures at the school and district level like class size, graduation rates, and class composition.
The primary purpose of SGPs is to provide educators and families with a clear picture of student progress over time. They help educators understand how much students have learned and how much more they need to learn, as compared to their academic peers. These insights are useful for identifying instructional needs and making informed decisions about classroom practices, school/district policies, and broader research efforts.
Student Growth Plots (SGP) are calculated from longitudinal student assessment data and use prior test scores as the measurement standard. They are used to estimate a student’s relative progress towards an established growth target, such as 85% of their academic peers. While SGP calculations are complex, the resulting information is presented in percentile terms that are familiar to teachers and parents.
Baseline-referenced SGPs require at least three years of stable assessment data to produce. This requirement makes them less accessible for use in educator evaluation systems, where the goal is to evaluate teachers based on whether or not their students have met passing growth standards. Baseline-referenced SGPs may also be more vulnerable to spurious correlations, owing to factors such as teacher or school characteristics and the design of the baseline cohort.
Cohort-referenced SGPs are a more flexible option for educator evaluation systems. They are derived from the same data sources as SGPs but do not require a minimum of five years of data. Cohort-referenced SGPs can be created with as little as one year of data, and they do not suffer from the same limitations that plague baseline-referenced SGPs.
Aside from their ease of use and flexibility, cohort-referenced SGPs can provide better results than baseline-referenced SGPs. Because baseline-referenced SGPs are based on the comparison of current year test scores to scale scores from a previous assessment, they may be subject to substantial variance in the correlation between the two variables. This can lead to an over- or under-estimating of a student’s progress, which can have negative implications for educator evaluation.
The sgptData_LONG data set contains anonymized student assessment data in the long format for a total of 8 windows (3 windows annually). The required variables for SGP analyses are: VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, YEAR, ID, SCALE_SCORE, GRADE and ACHIEVEMENT_LEVEL.
To create SGP analyses with sgptData_LONG, it is necessary to have the following tools installed: