SGP Data SGP data provides an objective measure to illustrate the extent to which students have improved or fallen behind their peers over time, providing educators with a picture of what students need to learn in order to meet state achievement targets and goals. SGP can also be used as a way of identifying students most in need of additional supports in order to make gains in learning.
SGP is calculated based on multiple assessments over time that are organized into “assessment windows.” Assessments within each window feature similar types and dates of assessments; they do not correspond directly with any one school year. As such, students enrolled at different schools can still be accurately compared against one another for accurate performance comparison over time at the same school.
Students’ Student Growth Progression scores reflect their improvements from all assessments over the previous years and include all improvements seen across all assessments; those with high scores typically have more room to improve than those with lower scores; however, SGPs should not be seen as replacing existing achievement targets or goals; rather they provide a more complete picture of student progress towards them and provide accurate communication to stakeholders of what the students must learn to meet their objectives.
To fully leverage SGP, school and district leaders need a solid grasp on the data used to calculate scores. To do so effectively, this data comes from the sgpData database which is updated each year with results from each assessment, providing districts the ability to compare the progress of their students against a similar set across the state.
The ID column in sgpData serves as a unique student identifier. The next five columns – GRADE_2013, GRADE_2014, GRADE_2015, GRADE_2016 and GRADE_2017 – display grade levels associated with each student assessment score across these years; while SS_2013, SS_2014, SS_2015, SS_2016 and SS_2017 represent scale scores associated with them during these same five years.
Integrating wide-format data such as sgpData with the SGP package is generally straightforward; please refer to the SGP Data Analysis Vignette for more detailed instructions on using wide data formats like sgpData for SGP analyses.
