Data sgp is a key tool for teachers and administrators looking to improve student learning and progress. However, it’s important to remember that data sgp is only one component of a comprehensive student evaluation system. It is also critical to use other assessment measures, such as formative assessments, to ensure that students are making adequate academic progress.
The goal of data sgp is to provide educators with an objective and fair measure of educator effectiveness. SGPs can be used to evaluate teachers and schools, inform decision-making about student groupings and educator allocation, and help with the identification of areas for improvement. SGPs must be interpreted and applied carefully, taking into account the policy goals and intended outcomes of an evaluation system.
SGP analyses are often very time consuming and complicated. For this reason, the SGP package has higher level functions (wrapper functions) to simplify the code needed for conducting operational analyses. These functions are called abcSGP and updateSGP. They take the exemplar LONG format data set sgpData_LONG and the anonymized, student-instructor lookup table sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER and create an SGP object Demonstration_SGP that incorporates them into a single function call. The lower level functions studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections can be used to conduct these analyses, but they are often simpler to use with the wrapper functions.
A student’s growth percentile is a measurement of their progress in comparison to their academic peers. These “academic peers” are other students in the same grade and assessment subject who have followed a similar score path over time. This year’s assessment results are compared to these previous years’ scores to determine a student’s growth percentile.
To compute a student’s growth percentile, a statistical method called quantile regression is used to analyze the relationship between students’ previous and current year’s scores. The regression model then describes how much a student has progressed in this year’s test by comparing it to the average of their academic peers’ growth.
When SGPs are aggregated to summarize the growth of subgroups, classes, schools or districts, medians are commonly used as the primary summary statistic. However, this choice may not be the most appropriate metric for describing the performance of these groups. Mean SGPs align more closely with the Department’s guiding philosophy that all students contribute to accountability results, and that all students should be expected to progress at a comparable rate.
School-level means have also been found to vary less from year to year than school medians when summarizing the same students. For example, when comparing mean SGPs to medians for 4th grade math, the standard deviation of the school mean SGP was 7.6 points, whereas the standard deviation for the school median was 10.9 points. This is a significant difference that is likely attributable to the greater stability of school means compared to medians. As a result, we recommend that school-level SGP analyses be performed using means rather than medians.