How to Use Data SGP to Compare Student Growth in the Classroom and Across Schools
Data sgp, the free software package for analyzing educational assessment data, allows educators to compare student growth in their classroom and across schools. It is based on the statistical software environment R and is available for Windows, OSX and Linux. While running SGP analyses requires some familiarity with R (and statistical analysis in general), the software is open source and is easily downloadable and compiled for any operating system.
The sgpData spreadsheet provides educators with a clear, straightforward way to access and display SGP data for individual students. This is especially helpful for assessing how a particular teacher or school is performing with respect to its goals and for comparing the progress of students with different backgrounds, grades, subjects and assessment scores. In addition, sgpData includes additional information for each student that is not displayed in the summary SGP report, including gender and socioeconomic status.
SGP is a number on a scale of 1-99, where higher numbers indicate greater relative growth. For example, a student with an SGP of 75 means that she has grown more than about 75 percent of her academic peers. Educators can use this information to determine whether or not a student has met or exceeded an achievement target set by the state.
By combining state achievement targets with SGP, school leaders can more accurately communicate how much progress needs to be made in order for students to reach proficiency. This information can be a powerful tool in communicating to families and community members that the goal is for every student to reach proficiency by a specified date. It can also help teachers and administrators identify the specific areas that need improvement, allowing for focused interventions to support student learning and achievement.
SGP stands apart from other methodologies by enabling schools to establish multi-year growth standards based on official state achievement targets/goals. This is particularly useful for communicating to stakeholders that proficiency must be reached within a certain time frame and in ensuring that schools remain on track with their achievement targets even when competing priorities arise.
The sgpData package uses the SGP calculator to analyze a given student’s assessment score history and generate a report of his or her relative growth in comparison with the average growth of his or her academic peers. The report includes a table of results that can be used to identify which students have grown more than or less than their peers, as well as the mean and median SGP scores for the group of academic peers with whom the student has been assessed. The report can be downloaded by selecting a single student in the SGP summary report and choosing “sgpData”. The sgpData table will appear in a new tab with all of the other data for that student. The sgpData table contains a column for each year of the student’s testing history, with the first five columns indicating the student’s grade level assessment score in each of those years.