Data sgp is a collective of aggregated student performance data collected over time that teachers and administrators use to understand students’ progress, inform classroom practices, evaluate schools/districts, and support broader research initiatives. It includes both individual-level measures like test scores and growth percentiles, as well as aggregated metrics at the school/district and district levels such as class size and attendance rates.
SGPs are calculated using a statistical process that compares a student’s assessment scores across years. The resulting data point represents a student’s current position on their expected growth trajectory. Students are compared to their peers – those in the same grade with the same combination of prior year test scores. Educators are then provided with the tools to determine what additional growth is needed for each student to reach proficiency and beyond.
Educators can view the SGPs for their individual students by selecting them in the Star Growth Report and choosing the SGP tab. These reports show a student’s SGP over the past five years of testing. The first column, ID, provides a unique student identifier while the following five columns, SS_2013, SS_2014, SS_2015, and SS_2016, provide the student’s assessment score from each of those years.
A critical component of the SGP methodology is that the results are not based on averages or medians of all students. This is because it would ignore important differences between students and their trajectories of growth. To account for these differences, the SGPs are computed using a statistical process that compares sgps of students with similar characteristics.
SGPs also take into account the difficulty of achieving a certain level of growth from a particular starting point. For example, Simon achieved a scale score of 370 on this year’s ELA exam. However, he scored 300 on the last year’s ELA exam, which means he had to make 70 points more than his previous result to improve from proficient to advanced.
Lastly, SGPs account for the effect of changes to state tests over time by adjusting the scale score for each year’s assessment. This allows for the comparison of students from different schools or districts who took the same tests during the same timeframe, despite possible differences in the level of the test or the way it was administered.
As educators become familiar with these new SGPs, it’s important to remember that this data is still preliminary and should not be used for high-stakes educator evaluations until at least 2018. The SGPs are being released early in order to allow educators to get familiar with this new tool, as well as to begin to explore its educational potential. The exemplar WIDE and LONG format data sets, available when one installs the SGPdata package, include a variety of instructional resources to help familiarize educators with this new approach to student growth analysis. The SGP summary report also contains instructional resources to help educators understand the details of the calculation behind each student’s individual SGP.