Data sgp is a collection of tools and resources designed to help educators understand the concepts behind student growth percentiles (SGP). It includes podcasts, videos, slideshows and a series of tutorials.
The toolkit is intended to complement a number of other OSPI and community-developed resources such as teacher training, FAQs and the Student Growth Toolkit website. While it is a great tool to have in your arsenal, we strongly recommend you start with one of the many other excellent resources that are already available.
SGP measures a student’s relative performance by comparing them to their academic peers with similar previous test scores. The scale ranges from 1 to 99, with higher numbers indicating greater relative growth. For example, a student with an SGP of 75 means they scored the same or better than 75% of their academic peers in a particular subject area.
While a student’s SGP can be confusing, it is important to remember that it only shows how well a student performed compared to their academic peers. It does not mean that a student was a “star” performer in a particular year or that they are on a growth trajectory to reach proficiency. SGP is a useful measure to highlight a student’s achievement and academic progress, even if the student does not yet meet standard.
Using SGPs for educator evaluation is a new concept for most districts and schools, and we know it can be challenging to find the time and energy to implement a whole new system of measurement. In addition, the complexity of the SGP model and its relationship to other assessment tools makes it a challenge for many district leaders to incorporate into their evaluation systems.
We believe it is vital that we support districts as they make this transition to a new system of accountability. For this reason, we are offering free online trainings on assessing student learning with SGPs, which are designed to support educators in using the data to identify and focus on areas for improvement. These webinars will be offered throughout the fall.
For those interested in exploring the raw SGP data for their students, we have released a sgpData_LONG dataset to provide an exemplar of what is needed for operational analyses with lower level SGP functions such as studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections. The first column, sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER provides an anonymized lookup table that indicates the teacher assigned to each student’s assessment record. The next 5 columns, SS_2013, SS_2014, SS_2015, and SS_2016, provide the student assessment scores from each of the five years used in SGP calculations.
For more information on using the sgpData_LONG dataset for SGP calculations, see the SGP package documentation for detailed explanations and examples. We also offer a more user-friendly SGP data visualization web page and a short video demonstration of how to use the sgpData_LONG database with sgptData.
