Data sgp is a data set that contains student assessment scores that are longitudinal (time dependent). The data can be formatted in either WIDE or LONG formats. In general, when using SGP analyses on data that is formatted in the WIDE format, each case/row represents a unique student and columns represent variables associated with the student at different times. In contrast, when using SGP analyses on data that are formatted in the LONG format, each row represents a window of time and the values associated with a given time period are spread across multiple rows in the data set. The SGPdata package, installed when you install the SGP application, includes exemplar WIDE and LONG data sets (sgpData and sgpData_LONG, respectively) to assist you in setting up your data for use with SGP analyses.
In addition to providing growth scores, the sgpData tables provide a number of other helpful indicators that can be used by educators to identify instructional challenges and opportunities. For example, the sgpData_CONTENTS table provides a measure of how much of a particular content area students have covered during a given window, and can be used to identify gaps in learning or to help plan curriculum and instruction.
Lastly, the sgpData tables contain percentile ranks for student growth that can be used by teachers and administrators to assess how well students are growing relative to their academic peers. Percentile ranks are determined by comparing the value of a student’s assessed score to the mean or median score for all other assessed students, and then ranking them accordingly. In this way, a teacher can see whether their students are growing more than, less than, or at the same rate as their peers and then take steps to improve student learning.
There are two types of SGP analyses that can be performed on data sgp: Window Specific SGP and Current SGP. The difference between these two is that Window Specific SGP is calculated for a single window of data and can only be used to compare a student to their academic peers in that particular window. On the other hand, Current SGP is calculated for an entire year of data and can be used to compare a student over time as well as to their peers in their grade level. Generally speaking, a student’s current SGP will be higher than their Window Specific SGP. This is because students are expected to grow at a similar rate from one year to the next. However, it is important to note that the differences between SGP scores over different windows of data can be quite large. This is why it is best to analyze data sgp over multiple windows of time whenever possible. This will give the greatest degree of accuracy in determining a student’s relative growth status. This is particularly true for the lower level SGP functions studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections.