Data Sgp is a tool that allows educators to better understand student progress over time. It compares assessment scores of students against those of academically-similar peers to reveal insights into how well a student is learning. The tool also provides teachers with the ability to better identify areas for improvement and inform classroom practices. It can also be used to evaluate schools and districts as well as support broader research initiatives.

Students are measured on a scale of 1-99 and higher numbers indicate greater relative growth. For example, a student who receives a score of 75 shows that they have grown faster than 75% of their academic peers. Teachers can use these scores to determine if their students are growing more than, less than, or at the same rate as expected.

The growth percentiles are calculated through comparing a student’s raw score on a particular exam section with the scores of other students who have similar academic histories. A student’s rank within their cohort is then determined by weighing these comparisons and can be seen on the graph above.

While this is an important and powerful metric, it does have some limitations. The first is that it can be misleading for students with superior academic abilities. For this reason, educators should be cautious about using this metric with high performing students. A low score in one test section could indicate difficulty with the subject matter or a lack of effort on the part of the student, which is not necessarily related to their prior performance.

In addition, student growth percentiles can be affected by differences in school/teacher characteristics and the composition of baseline cohorts. Educators should review the results of their SGPs carefully to ensure that they are interpreting them correctly.

SGPs can be reported in two formats: Window Specific SGPs, which compare or report student growth across different windows, and Current SGPs, which provide a snapshot of a student’s growth at any given point in time. Window Specific SGPs must have a minimum of two separate assessments, and the assessments can be from different testing windows. The two assessments must be from different grade levels, and they must cover the same curriculum and content.

The SGP analysis tool uses the R statistical software platform and is free to download with numerous online resources available to help users get started. Although it is designed specifically for educational assessment data, its analysis tools are flexible enough to accommodate any kind of statistical data. The data SGP analysis tool supports the wide and long formats of the R dataset and can be run either from a command line or as a Python script. We recommend utilizing the LONG format for operational analyses, as this makes managing and updating analyses much simpler than with WIDE data sets. The higher level functions that perform SGP analyses rely on the embedded SGPstateData meta-data and require it to be in the LONG format. This is especially true when analyzing longitudinal data.