Data SGP is a metric that compares a student’s current test score with that of similar past test takers (their academic peers). This allows educators to gain insight into a student’s performance relative to his or her peers and allows educators to highlight areas of concern or provide support as necessary.
SGPs are calculated using students’ standardized test scores in combination with covariate information gathered through prior test history, creating more precise measures of growth than traditional percentiles that solely take raw scores into consideration.
Teachers using SGP can assess the effectiveness of their instruction, identify student learning trends, inform classroom practices, assess students/teachers and support broader research initiatives. Data SGP also offers educators another measure of student progress towards official state achievement targets/goals that standard growth models or other methods cannot achieve.
SGP analyses require significant computing power. Optimizing data structure and minimizing variables used can significantly lower computational demands, one effective strategy being preprocessing to remove redundant elements or duplicate testing windows – helping lower memory usage while improving accuracy estimates produced by SGP estimation models.
SGPs for individual students can be found on the BAA Secure Site; however, SGPs for teachers/schools/districts have yet to be prepared for high-stakes evaluation due to training needs as well as being an emerging data metric that needs time for state level stabilization.
The Student Growth Progresses available on the BAA Secure Site are only a sample of what will be used for teacher, school and district evaluations in 2018-19; nevertheless, educators should become acquainted with them now to be ready to use them effectively when higher stakes educator evaluation systems come into effect in 2019-20.
To do this, educators should select a student in the SGP Summary report and download their sgpData spreadsheet displayed by clicking on “SGP Data” tab. This file includes five years of vertically scaled assessment data with associated teacher lists for every student and their SGP along with a table that displays previous test scores, current test scores and growth percentile based on SGPs.
SGPs are only available to students who have taken two or more tests in a similar subject area and taken them during different testing windows (the last test must have been administered statewide in fall, winter or spring of each year). While data files provided by BAA Secure Site provide a starting point for SGP analysis, educators should fully comprehend how structured data works so as to correctly interpret its results and read/interpret them correctly.