The student growth percentile (SGP) is a measure of a student’s academic progress, compared to students with similar prior test scores. This is an important way to compare students who have been in school for a long time and who are working hard to improve.
SGP is used in a wide variety of ways, including for operational analysis, evaluating curriculum and instruction, and for making instructional decisions about where to place students. The SGP is often used in conjunction with other data to help teachers make informed decisions about students’ learning needs and level of support.
Using WIDE and LONG formatted data with SGP analyses
The SGP package supports both WIDE and LONG formatted student assessment data, which are commonly used in education to represent longitudinal or time dependent student assessment. The WIDE format is based on cases/rows, each case/row representing a unique student with multiple columns representing variables associated with the student at different times.
This type of data is a common format in the Wyoming system and the SGP package provides exemplar WIDE data sets sgpData and sgpData_LONG to assist in setting up your own data, as well as INSTRUCTOR-STUDENT lookup files sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER and sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_ID to create the data set needed for an SGP analysis.
When creating a data set for an SGP analysis, the following 7 variables must be included in your sgpData: *VALID_CASE*; *CONTENT_AREA*; *YEAR*; *ID*; *SCALE_SCORE*; and *GRADE*. These are demographic/student categorization variables, and they are required when running the student growth projections or student aggregates functions of the SGP package.
These data are typically generated by your school or district and are usually available at the time of the analysis, but may take a few days to arrive. Please consult the SGP data analysis vignette for more information on how to use this type of data in an SGP analysis.
Adding an SGP to your students’ report
The SGP is a common metric used in assessing students’ academic progress, but it can be difficult to find the correct data to use. This is because most schools do not have access to all of their student assessment data, or they have limited access to only a small subset of their data.
Adding an SGP to a student’s report can be complex, but it is useful in providing educators with a clearer picture of the student’s academic progress, especially for students who are not meeting their standards yet. It also allows educators to compare students who have been in school for years and to more accurately assess their students’ needs and level of support.
Percentiles are an arithmetic function that can be very complex to calculate, but they are a familiar method of measuring student progress and can provide an accurate measure of a student’s academic growth. A student who shows more than 85 percent growth over a certain period of time, for example, has an SGP of 85.
In addition to SGP, the SGP package includes a number of other types of data that can be used for analyzing student progress, including achievement percentiles, accelerated learning percentiles, and more. These include a variety of other arithmetic functions and can be used to analyze your student’s progress across a range of learning levels, including those students who have been in school for many years and are working hard to improve.