MCAS Data – What is Data SGP?
Data sgp is a set of statistical functions designed to perform calculations and visualizations on MCAS assessment data. It can be used to find student achievement levels and trends over time, to identify academic growth gaps, and for comparisons with student populations. It can also be used to determine a range of possible educator evaluation outcomes.
A number of schools and districts use SGPs to evaluate the effectiveness of their educators. SGPs can be helpful for evaluating teachers and school leaders, but they should be interpreted carefully and with caution, especially in the context of teacher performance appraisals.
Educators should consider how SGPs are used in their district before using them to make evaluation decisions. SGPs are not meant to replace traditional evaluation systems and should be used in addition to other assessment data, not instead of it. SGPs should be reviewed by educators, school and district leadership, and data teams to identify areas of success and identify areas for improvement.
In interpreting SGPs, it is important to remember that they are calculated based on the relative performance of students with similar assessment score histories. In this way, a student’s SGP may be very different from the SGP of another student with a completely different assessment score history.
For example, Student A and Student B both scored the same on this year’s MCAS test in a subject area, but their SGPs are very different. This is because their assessment scores are being compared to different academic peer groups from previous MCAS administrations in order to calculate their SGPs.
In order to run SGP analyses, a district must have access to the data files provided by the state and in the proper format. The lower level SGP functions, studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections, require WIDE formatted data whereas the higher level wrapper functions (including SGP visualization tools) utilize LONG formatted data. For the simplest, one-off analyses, WIDE data can be used, but for those that plan to run operationally year after year, it is recommended that data be formatted in LONG format for all SGP analyses. There are a variety of preparation and storage benefits to managing data in the LONG format over the WIDE format.