Data SGP (Student Growth in Academic Achievement) is an educational data set used by numerous educational organizations and school leaders to evaluate school effectiveness; parents may find this helpful when making school selection decisions; in addition, researchers may utilize it as a way to strengthen their studies.
SGPs (Student Growth Pathways) measure student growth relative to students who scored similarly on prior tests (their academic peers). Although calculations for SGPs can be complex, educators and parents can easily communicate them using percentile terms that are familiar.
For SGP analyses, a computer equipped with R is necessary. R is a robust statistical computing environment which is available on multiple platforms including Windows, OSX and Linux; to download and install it for yourself visit the official R Project website.
The SGPdata package included with R SGP provides two exemplar data sets for working with longitudinal (time dependent) student assessment data. The sgpData_WIDE file provides anonymized panel data of five years of annual, vertically scaled assessments for each student; its rows contain their unique student identifier while its columns reflect time dependent variables related to that student. sgpData_LONG is similar, except each column represents different longitudinal variables per year of data collection.
To perform SGP analyses, import the SGPdata package and setup your data. After doing so, use studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections from this package; abcSGP and updateSGP provide wrapper functions that help simplify source code used to perform these analyses.
These functions calculate student growth percentiles and generate projections for all groups of students, creating projections and reports on all analyses conducted within one grade level. This report can be used to compare group performances within schools or districts as well as gain insight into why certain groups outshone others.
With this tool, it’s simple to compare results of SGP analyses across schools, districts, and states. Plus, this data can help identify trends in student performance over time as well as by gender, race and socioeconomic status – providing vital insights that could lead to changes in curriculum or instructional practices that result in increased student achievement.
The SGP data set can provide schools and districts with invaluable insights into their educational practices. However, it’s essential that they first consider its limitations before making decisions regarding its usage. As a starting point, take time to think through some questions such as:
