Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) measure how much students have improved academic skills from one year to the next when compared with “academic peers”, or those students who achieved similar performances on MCAS tests in prior years. SGPs should be used along with scaled scores and achievement levels in providing an accurate picture of learning for any particular student.
Example: If a student achieved an SGP score of 60 on previous MCAS administrations in their subject area, this indicates they performed as high as or better than 60% of their academic peers; however, two students with identical scores can have different SGPs due to different academic peer groups.
To assess a student’s SGP, the state uses assessments from two years prior. This ensures that SGP scores can be accurately compared and provides more precise measures of relative growth.
SGPs can be viewed in both the Star Growth Report and teacher profile pages by selecting either prior or current school years in the Timeframe drop down list, or My SGP tab of their teacher profiles page. They can then be sorted in numerous ways including academic peer group, subject area or year – providing an overview of student growth over time that can help identify areas for improvement or track a student’s progression over the course of a school year.
The sgpData package provides sample WIDE and LONG format data sets suitable for longitudinal time dependent analyses with the SGP tools. For more information on formatting data for use with these tools, refer to the SGP data analysis vignette.
As well as SGP, the sgpData package contains several useful functions for analyzing and interpreting student assessment data. For instance, its Instructor Lookup table provides an anonymous list of teachers associated with each test record in SGP.
At 160 acres southeast of Lamont, the SGP observatory forms part of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) cloud and radiation testbed of the United States Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program. Researchers in ARM collect and analyze data at both its Central Facility and from remote instruments throughout its site – available publicly through Data Discovery – primarily supporting research in cloud transfer research as well as contributing to improving climate models; its instrumentation is maintained by a team of 30 scientists and technicians at University of Colorado Boulder.