Data sgp is an analysis tool designed to help educators understand student progress in learning and to use this information to develop educational plans for each individual student. It compares assessment scores of students against their academic peers to reveal insights into how they are performing and the relative growth that is necessary for success in a given course or subject area. It also reveals insights into how teachers might improve their teaching methods by understanding whether students are making adequate progress towards proficiency within a specific timeframe.
The SGP analysis tool uses longitudinal student assessment data formatted in either WIDE or LONG formats. The lower level functions, studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections can accept either format but if running SGP analyses on an operational basis year after year it is typically preferable to work with the LONG format which offers numerous preparation, storage and retrieval benefits.
Unlike standard growth models or other methods, the SGP analysis tool allows schools and districts to link student/teacher performance against official state achievement targets/goals which serve as a mechanism for identifying the achievement gap between students/teachers. Michigan specifically utilizes test score progression data in educator evaluation systems; thus the ability to report and compare student/teacher performance against measurable state goals is a key feature of the SGP analysis.
SGPs are calculated based on a statistical method called quantile regression that compares current assessment scores to the results of previous years’ assessments. Students are compared to their “academic peers” which are other students in the same grade and/or the same assessment subject who have similar historical assessment score paths. The SGP percentages are derived by measuring the difference between a student’s assessed score and the average of his or her academic peer group. SGP percentiles range from 1 to 99 and are interpreted like percentile ranks; lower numbers indicate less relative growth and higher numbers indicate greater relative growth.
Data SGP is a free and open source software application that can be run on Windows, Mac OSX or Linux. It is designed to work with educational assessment data, but it is capable of working with any type of statistical datasets. The software can be run interactively on a desktop computer or from the command line using a script which can automate the process for large numbers of student records. There are several tutorials and online resources to assist users who are new to the analysis tool.
In addition to the SGP summary reports, educators can access a more detailed SGP data spreadsheet for each student by selecting a student and choosing the sgpData tab. The data spreadsheet contains all of the SGP data available for that student over five years. The first column, ID, provides the student unique identifier while the remaining columns, SS_2013, SS_2014, SS_2015, SS_2016 and SS_2017 provide their respective assessment score data for each year of the five-year span. The spreadsheet also includes a row labeled “SGP” that displays the resulting SGP percentiles.