Data sgp is a data set that provides teachers, schools and districts with student growth results for grades 4 through 11. SGP results are normalized to account for the number of assessments students take over their lifetime. SGP results are also adjusted for the type of assessment used. For example, students taking the WKCE and Forward Exams will have very different scores than those taking the Badger Exam.
Using the data sgp data set for student growth percentile analyses requires some understanding of statistical analysis and of the data sgp format. We suggest reading our vignette on SGP data analysis for more information.
The data sgp format contains long-format test data in three content areas that are normalized to produce student growth percentageiles for every student. The first column of the data set contains a unique student identifier followed by five columns that contain the students’ test score histories over the course of their academic career. The test scores are scaled to a common performance level of 100 and aggregated to provide the students’ growth report.
A key difference in SGP methodology compared to MAP is the use of multi-year longitudinal data rather than a single year of a new assessment. This allows the calculation of student growth trajectories that can be projected to future achievement levels.
Using these projected growth trajectories it is possible to determine what level of growth (expressed as a growth standard) a student will need in order to reach or maintain proficiency at their current achievement level. These projections are calculated as part of a growth achievement plot which shows both the percentile cut points indicating what level of growth will be needed to meet an achievement target and the actual growth trajectories.
The plots can be sorted by either the cut point or the percentile of the trajectories. The plots can also be displayed as a bar chart or a line graph. The trajectories are also shown for the whole cohort as well as by individual teachers and schools.
The growth achievement plots can be customized by a number of parameters including a choice of timeframes (in addition to the default window specific reports). SGP state data sets also include an argument that specifies whether or not the state uses a cohort or baseline referenced system. The function also accepts a vector indicating the years to include in the growth achievement plots. If the vector is missing the function will use the last available year in the data to produce the plots. The vector can be specified in a folder named “Visualizations/growthAchievementPlots” or the corresponding label in the SGP data set. The function can be configured to ignore previous test transition data by setting the argument to FALSE. The function can also be configured to automatically produce the graphs when a teacher’s class list is added to the SGP data set. This is useful for teacher evaluations as it avoids the need to manually produce the plots after every new batch of classes.