Using the data sgp tool is an important part of familiarizing yourself with student growth percentages. This tool allows you to see a single growth estimate for each student for a given course. These estimates are based on student achievement from multiple assessments over time. Students with higher achievement tend to have greater growth, and students with lower achievement may experience less growth. It is also important to note that the tool does not show teacher impact on a student’s progress, which is only calculated for courses that have been taught by the teachers of record for at least 60% of the school year prior to state assessment testing (mSGP).
The most important thing to remember is that differences in a student’s SGP ranking from one year to another are the result of shifts in the overall average SGP value for the class across the years and are not necessarily reflective of the student’s performance in any particular year. These shifts can be due to many different factors, including the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on statewide test scores and the change in SGP calculation methods from year to year.
To use the data sgp tool you will need the following:
A computer with R software installed (which is available for Windows, OSX, and Linux). The SGP package was built for the R programming environment but is written in C++, and therefore can be run on most any hardware platform. The SGP package requires a minimum of a 4 core machine for running the PERCENTILES and PROJECTIONS analyses on large states.
In addition to the standard functions in the sgp package, there are also higher level wrapper functions (like abcSGP) that simplify the 6 steps of the sgp calculations. These functions are helpful if you will be conducting operational SGP analyses year after year as they combine the necessary steps into a single function call.
For most analyses, the key to success is proper data preparation. In almost all cases any errors encountered during SGP analyses revert back to data preparation problems so ensuring that your data is prepared correctly is crucial.
The key piece of information in the sgpData file is the unique student identifier (ID) which will be used to identify each individual student’s assessment score in each of the 5 years used in the SGP calculation. The next 5 columns, SS_2013, SS_2014, SS_2015, and SS_2016, provide the scale score for each student in each of those years.
The sgpData file can be found on the BAA Secure Site in the “Reports” section under “Student”. There is an option to download a sgpData file for each individual student (4th-11th grade) or for an entire district. Districts are encouraged to use the sgpData files to get comfortable with this new data before considering using it for educator evaluations. It is recommended that districts wait until the 2018-19 year to begin using SGPs for high stakes evaluations. In this way, there are three more years to gain experience with the SGP data and to ensure that the results remain stable.