sgp is a software program and database that allows researchers to explore student growth in academic achievement. It is used by many educational organizations to assess the effectiveness of schools, teachers, and school leaders. It can also help parents decide which school is best for their child. It can be downloaded from the internet for free. To use sgp, you will need a computer with the free software program R installed. This is a statistical computing environment that is not intuitive and requires some familiarity with programming languages.
Generally, the more knowledge you have about the topic, the easier it will be to understand the data and the results of an analysis. It is recommended that you read a few articles on the subject before beginning any work. You should also consider reading the vignettes to get an idea of how the SGP functions are supposed to work.
In addition to these resources, the SGP GitHub project page contains various examples of how the sgp functions can be used to analyze the data. Lastly, the SGP wiki has several tips and tricks for working with the data.
The sgpData_WIDE data set contains anonymized panel data for five years of annual, vertically scaled assessments. The first column, ID, provides the unique student identifier and the subsequent columns provide assessment scores for each year of the longitudinal data. The missing values are shown as NA.
SGP analyses are often complicated by the fact that students are tested more than once and have multiple instructors over their academic careers. The sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER data set contains an anonymized teacher-student lookup table that associates a student’s test records with their instructor. This allows for the identification of a single teacher to whom a student was assigned for a particular content area and year.
A student growth percentile (SGP) is an estimate of a student’s relative performance on MCAS. A student is expected to grow at the 90th percentile if they performed like 90% of students who had similar MCAS performance histories.
Despite the common perception that SGPs are a measure of individual student performance, they are in reality a proxy for the performance of a group of students. Our research shows that there is a strong relationship between student growth and achievement, and these relationships would exist even if true SGPs could be measured perfectly through tests with no measurement error.
