The data sgp tool compares students’ assessment scores with academically similar ones of their peers to provide insights into learning progress. This data can be useful for evaluations, classroom practice enhancement, meeting student achievement goals and measuring school effectiveness – however interpreting this data may prove challenging – here are a few tips to assist educators better utilize and interpret this tool.
Teachers looking for SGP data can register with their state website and download customized reports tailored specifically to their school or district. These reports allow educators to evaluate student performance over time, such as which percentages fell outside or exceeded their curve. They also enable educators to compare students’ achievements against official state achievement targets or goals; something standard growth models alone cannot do.
Some states also include scoreboards in these reports to give educators an easy way to compare student performance with both state averages, top performers, and bottom performers across districts or even their entire state. Scoreboards can be especially useful when evaluating teachers as they provide them with an accurate snapshot of how well their students are progressing toward meeting measurable achievement goals.
For these tools to work effectively, a school or district must first possess valid SGP data for the course and teacher that they wish to evaluate, as well as for at least 60% of the year preceding state assessments (i.e. the teacher of record that held classes when test administration took place) that they wish to analyze. Furthermore, data must either be formatted as WIDE or LONG data formats in order to allow lower level functions such as studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections be performed more accurately while higher level wrapper functions may use LONG data formats to achieve preparation or storage advantages.
One thing to be mindful of with these growth graphs is that they do not include SGPs for high school students before fall of 2019. Furthermore, the distribution does not follow a bell-shaped curve with equal numbers at each percentile point (the diagram on the right shows decile groupsings of 10 percentiles).
Once all the data are in, conducting analyses should be relatively straightforward and easy. Most SGP analyses involve just two steps – data preparation for calculation and then running calculations – so if you need help getting started please refer to our help pages and podcasts below – otherwise do not hesitate to get in touch! If any further assistance is required do not hesitate to get in touch!