Data SGP leverages longitudinal student assessment data to produce statistical growth plots, which measure students’ relative progress compared to academic peers. These plots can be interpreted as percentageiles, which are familiar to teachers and parents, and they enable educators to communicate their students’ progress in a format that is meaningful and useful to them. Although the calculations behind SGPs are complex, they can be generated using data that is readily available to most schools and teachers.
SGPs are calculated from a student’s standardized test score history and a set of predefined covariates. The calculation process is facilitated by the presence of a common naming convention for tests and the use of a uniform scoring system. In addition, the sgpData set is designed to be compatible with existing tools for interpreting student growth percentiles and providing teacher-level reporting.
sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER is an anonymized, student-instructor lookup table that provides insturctor information associated with each students test record. Note that a student can have more than one teacher associated with their test record, and in many cases multiple teachers will be assigned to the same students. The sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER dataset is intended to model the format of data that should be used with the lower level studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections functions.
The sgpData_LONG dataset is an anonymized, panel data set comprising 5 years of annual, vertically scaled, assessment data in WIDE format. This exemplar data set models the format of data required for most of the higher level SGP functions. The first column, ID, must provide a unique student identifier. The remaining columns, YEAR, GENDER, CONTENT_AREA, SCALE_SCORE, and GRADE_LEVEL, provide the data attributes required by the studentGrowthPercentiles and StudentGrowthProjections functions.
It is recommended that LONG formatted data be used for operational analyses, as the management of this type of data is generally simpler than working with wide formatted data sets. The SGP analysis vignette contains detailed documentation on using sgpData and SGP functions with LONG formatted data.