Data sgp is an important tool for educators and administrators to use in assessing student growth and achievement. SGP scores compare students’ current performance to the performance of their academic peers who have similar score histories. This allows educators to determine whether a student is growing more than, less than, or at the expected rate.
SGP scores are reported for each student in two formats: Window Specific SGP, a measure that reports an individual student’s relative growth over a specific time frame, and Current SGP, a measure of a student’s overall progress over the course of a school year. These results can help teachers and administrators determine if their students are making progress in the expected way and inform decisions about student learning needs.
A number of variables are available for analyzing SGP data. The most important are VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, and YEAR. These are required for any analysis, including creating Student Growth Plots. The rest of the variables are demographic/student categorization variables. sgptData_LONG, an exemplar data set installed with the SGP package, contains all of the required variables for SGP analyses.
The sgptData_LONG data set provides longitudinal (time dependent) student assessment data in WIDE format with 8 windows (3 windows annually) of assessments in LONG format for 3 content areas: Early Literacy, Mathematics, and Reading. The sgptData_LONG also includes additional demographic/student categorization variables not used in SGP analyses, but required for running student growth projections and plots.
Despite the recent hype about “big data,” SGP research uses relatively modest datasets when compared to the scale of big data typically studied in scientific fields and businesses. For example, a sample of 5 years of student assessment data is very small when compared to the billions of social media interactions analyzed by Google each day.
The SGP package and exemplar WIDE and LONG data sets provided with the installation of the SGP package are designed to make it as easy as possible for users to analyze student growth data. To learn more about using the data, please consult the SGP Data Analysis Vignette. The SGP website also has a series of stakeholder-specific guides that provide detailed information on how to access and interpret SGP reports for Administrators, Educators, and Families. These guides include prompts that can be used to facilitate conversations about student growth and achievement with administrators, educators, and families.
