Data sgp provides educators and parents with a quick and easy way to evaluate relative student growth. SGP scores are reported on a 1 to 99 scale with higher numbers indicating more relative growth than lower ones. For example, a student’s SGP of 75 indicates that she has demonstrated more growth than about 75 percent of her academic peers. SGP scores are calculated and displayed for students in the grades tested on the Badger Exam, WKCE, Forward Exam, and Wisconsin Forward Assessment (WFA) with up to five years of test score history included.
SGP estimates are based on the historical growth trajectories of Star examinees and can help teachers and administrators predict what student performance might be if they continue on their current path. For this reason, SGPs are often aggregated to teacher and school levels as indicators of educator effectiveness. However, recent research has shown that SGPs estimated from standardized test scores are error-prone measures of their corresponding latent achievement attributes and thus should be considered noisy measures of educator effectiveness (Akram, Erickson, & Meyer, 2013; Lockwood & Castellano, 2015).
The sgpData spreadsheet is an easily accessible and convenient tool for understanding and interpreting SGP. It contains numerous tables and files that provide a variety of data for evaluating student performance. For example, the sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER table is an anonymized lookup table that provides instructor details associated with each student test record. Teachers can use this table to see which instructors have taught each student in a particular content area for each academic year.
Another vital sgpData table is the sgpData_STUDENTS_PERCENTILE_TABLE, which provides educators with a means to compare their students’ performance against that of similar students in their district, state, or country. This information is useful for assessing the level of progress that students have made toward reaching or maintaining proficiency and can be used to target instruction to meet student needs.
In addition to these two key sgpData tables, the sgpData file also includes a sgpData_LOCAL_TEST_SCORE_TABLE and sgpData_LONG_DATA_TABLE. The sgpData_LOCAL_TEST_SCORE_TABLE is a list of student’s standardized test scores from their local tests. This data is needed when creating student growth and achievement plots, as it provides the necessary test score data to calculate the student’s SGP. The sgpData_LONG_DATA_TABLE contains the long format data set sgptData with 8 windows (3 windows annually) of assessment in LONG format for three content areas.
When using the sgpData_LONG_DATA_TABLE, users should note that the sgpData file contains 7 required variables: VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, YEAR, ID, SCALE_SCORE, GRADE and ACHIEVEMENT_LEVEL. These are the variables that must be specified when importing the data using the function studentGrowthPercentiles or running student growth projections. The rest of the variables in sgpData are demographic/student categorization variables used to create student aggregates by the summarizeSGP function. Please refer to the SGP data analysis vignette for more detailed documentation on how to utilize these variable formats with these functions.