Data SGP is a database containing student academic growth information used by educational organizations to assess schools, teachers and school leaders as well as parents making informed decisions about which school would best meet their child’s needs. Parents can use Data sGP data to make educated choices when selecting schools for their children while teachers use this database to enhance their teaching methods.
Student growth percentiles (SGPs) are measures of student progress in academic achievement over time compared to students with similar prior test scores. SGPs can be used to communicate student achievement in terms that are familiar to educators and parents while giving an accurate depiction of student achievement than test score measures alone. Furthermore, SGPs may help create alternative accountability systems which emphasize growth rather than test score gains alone.
Download R free of charge from the internet, a powerful statistical computing environment that runs on Windows, OSX and Linux platforms. The SGP package comes equipped with an easy-to-follow tutorial and comprehensive documentation for newcomers that is also accessible online at sgp.pdf; additionally there are additional resources such as example analyses written in R available on its own website at sgp.info.
The sgpData_LONG dataset is an anonymized panel data set composed of assessment results in long format for 8 windows (3 windows annually) across three content areas, collected over 8 windows over three years and including assessment scores from eight windows (3 windows annually). It includes 7 required variables for SGP analyses: VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, YEAR, ID, SCALE_SCORE GRADE ACHIEVEMENT LEVEL as well as LAST_NAME and FIRST_NAME for individual student growth and achievement plots.
Access SGPs more efficiently using the sgpData_WIDE data set, which is similar to its long counterpart but without demographic variables and includes an extra variable called DATE that represents when each teacher conducted tests; this date field can help analyze student growth over time and can even be imported directly into an R-based application such as SGP for longitudinal analyses of student performance.
Use of the sgpData_WIDE and sgpData_LONG data sets with SGP to calculate SGPs is generally straightforward, with just a few caveats that users should be mindful of: firstly, due to each teacher having multiple classes during any year, some teachers may appear more than once within each dataset (sgpData_WIDE contains more than one student for every teacher), while the sgpData_LONG contains multiple student-instructor lookup tables which must be used correctly in order to associate teacher test records with student data correctly.
For more detailed instructions on using the SGP package, refer to its vignette. Additionally, there is a wiki page called sgpData_LONG that offers examples and detailed instructions on working with this data set, along with links to numerous useful websites which have already conducted SGP analyses on it – especially helpful if users plan to incorporate it in their analyses themselves.