What is a Data SGP?
A data sgp is the set of growth scores for individual students that can be used to measure relative student learning gains. It is calculated by comparing a student’s performance to that of his or her academic peers in the same grade and content area. The data sgp can help teachers and administrators identify which students are growing faster or slower than their peers. It can also provide insights into how to target instructional resources.
A key component of the data sgp is the student-instructor lookup table (sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER) which is linked to each assessment record. This table includes information about the teacher of record for each class and whether a student was taught by that teacher. This information is important because it allows users to analyze SGPs across the entire student population rather than just those for whom the teacher was a teacher of record.
For each assessment, a SGP is calculated for a given student by comparing the student’s score to the sum of the scores for his or her academic peers who scored similarly on the test. SGPs are determined by averaging the students’ scores in each of three different testing windows. This allows the state to compare student performances to those of their academic peers from other schools and districts.
The SGPs produced by the mSGP system are reported to teachers and administrators in two formats: Window Specific SGPs which can be used to compare student growth across one or more windows, and Current SGPs which provide the most recent SGP available for a student as a check-in of a student’s progress. The mSGP system can be used to create SGPs for English language arts and mathematics grades in which there is adequate historical MCAS data and comparable test scores.
In order to produce SGPs, the mSGP system takes up to two years of MCAS assessment data. This is the minimum amount of data required in order to calculate a valid SGP. SGPs are only calculated for students who have been enrolled in the same classroom for at least 60% of the year before the state assessment is administered. This is designed to ensure that all students are exposed to the same curriculum and instruction.
A key consideration when running SGP analyses is the choice to format data in WIDE or LONG data formats. The lower level functions studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections utilize the WIDE data format while higher level wrapper functions such as the summarizeSGP function use the LONG data format. For most operational analyses it is recommended that users utilize the LONG data format as it offers numerous preparation and storage benefits over the WIDE data format. The required variables for the long data format include VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, YEAR, ID, SCALE_SCORE, GRADE and ACHIEVEMENT_LEVEL. These variables are a necessary part of the analysis process and are required for all analyses that produce SGPs or student growth projections/trajectories. The optional PERFORMANCE_CATEGORY variable is not used for these analyses.