Data SGPs provide educators with an effective tool to assess student growth. By comparing a student’s score on an assessment to his or her academic peers (defined as students in his/her grade and subject who have had statistically comparable scores on previous assessments), SGPs allow educators to measure student improvement from year to year. Traditional achievement reports typically just display average scores while SGPs offer more insight.
SGPs are normed, meaning they are created using samples of students from across a state who have taken a single test. SGP models calculate percentile differences by comparing test scores of these students against an average test score for students in their grade and subject using only assessment scores (no demographic or program participation information is included in the sample). These percentiles can then be used to estimate each student’s growth percentile.
Students whose scores are analyzed with mSGP are organized by grade level and subject in the database and then ranked according to their growth percentiles. This allows teachers to see where each of their students ranks as well as understand how much improvement their class made over the prior year, compare students from other schools with similar rankings, as well as view results with an Excel spreadsheet for sorting and viewing purposes.
The Excel spreadsheet is updated daily with the most up-to-date data from the state database, providing detailed information for every subject measured by SGP: English, math, science, reading and STEM subjects as well as test details such as number taken and how many questions answered correctly by individual students.
The first column in the sgpData spreadsheet, “id,” provides an unique student identifier. Subsequent columns (SS_2013 – 2016) display assessment scores in each of these five years for that student; finally SS_2017 contains their current ACT assessment score.
The sgpData spreadsheet also features additional variables frequently used for analyses. One such variable, HIGH_NEED_STATUS, shows students at both ends of each subject area quartile range in each school. Furthermore, users can sort this spreadsheet to display only those students with HIGH_NEED_STATUS as this enables users to focus on students that require most assistance in improving.