What is Student Growth Percentiles (SGP)?
Student Growth Percentiles (SGP) are a relative measure of student achievement. They tell you how much a student has improved from one year to the next on a state assessment, in comparison to academically-similar students. SGPs range from 1 to 99 and are interpreted just like percentile ranks. An SGP of 85 means that a student showed more growth than 85 percent of their academic peers.
SGPs are calculated using a student’s test score history, including the Badger assessment. The growth trajectories used to produce SGPs are computed from the maximum order available with the coefficient matrices, so it’s important that all of a student’s assessment occurrences be included in their test score history. For this reason, SGPs are not displayed for students who did not take all of the state assessments in 2015-16 or for the 2014-15 Badger assessment.
While the term ‘big data’ has gained considerable popularity in recent years, SGP analyses still require relatively modest amounts of information and can be run on computers running Windows, OSX, or Linux. While the current dataset assembles a huge amount of information, it is not quite ‘big data’ in the sense that the data set would be suited to an analysis of global Facebook interactions, for example.
The SGP data consists of state assessment data that has been aggregated and normalized at the school, classroom, teacher, and student levels. The resulting data is then analyzed to generate SGPs and other measures of student progress. The data is then shared with educators and families to help them understand their student’s performance.
SGPs are a critical component of the federal accountability system and will be used to evaluate teachers and schools starting in 2018. State law does not allow for use of SGPs in educator evaluations until 2018/19 which gives educators several more years to become familiar with the new information before it is used in high stakes contexts.
Educators can learn more about SGPs by reading the FAQs on this website or by attending workshops. Teachers should also incorporate SGPs into their SLOs and data teams should review and share them with students and parents.
While the state has a new reporting structure, our goal remains to provide you with timely and useful data that you can use in your practice to improve instruction for all students. We will continue to provide a wide array of resources and professional development opportunities to support your efforts in this work.
The SGPdata package installed with the data sgp application includes an exemplar WIDE format data set and a long format data set to assist you in setting up your own longitudinal assessment data for the use of the lower level studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections functions. The exemplar data set, sgpData, is an anonymized panel dataset comprising five years of annual, vertically scaled student assessment data. Each row of the sgpData file represents a unique student and each column represents a different assessment occurrence.