Data SGP is a tool that provides teachers, administrators and parents with more detailed information about student growth than statewide averages alone. It reveals individual and group differences in achievement, and can help educators and school teams identify areas of success as well as those where improvement is needed.

Individual SGPs can and should be shared with students and families, to provide a more complete picture of their progress. The information provided can be used to support individualized instruction, inform educator SLOs, and assist in setting future goals. In addition, the ability to identify patterns of achievement across several tests enables educators to analyze results and make more informed decisions about how to improve instructional practices.

The information provided in the SGP dashboard is a snapshot of an individual’s growth, with an emphasis on recent trends. While the current dashboard focuses on student performance, the data will be continually updated as new test results become available. In the future, districts and educators may access SGPs on a district, school or class level, to see more detailed information about their performance and compare that to the performance of other schools in the state.

SGPs are calculated using a combination of factors including a student’s starting point, the assessment that they are taking, and the difficulty of the questions. SGPs can also be adjusted for differences in the length of time a student has been in a particular grade or school.

As the number of years a student has been in a particular school increases, their SGP will typically decline. This is due to the fact that more opportunities are available for students to take tests, and each additional year of testing results in less growth than the previous one.

SGP is an important tool in the effort to close the achievement gap, and it can be helpful to determine which students need intervention or special education services. It can be challenging for educators to interpret the meaning of SGPs, so it is important for districts to provide training and support to their staff to enable them to use the data effectively.

A growing trend in the education community is embracing the concept of “big data,” which refers to large datasets that can be used to answer complex scientific questions. While the SGP data is a vast amount of information, it is not considered to be big data in comparison to, for example, the analysis of global Facebook interactions.

The sgpdatadata package (installed when you install the SGPdata toolkit) includes exemplar WIDE and LONG format data sets to help users set up their own longitudinal (time dependent) student assessment data. A student’s longitudinal data set will include a WIDE or LONG table with cases/rows representing unique students and columns containing various variables associated with the student at different times. The sgpdata_long_demo data set contains the required variables for creating longitudinal student growth percentiles. These percentiles can be compared with those generated from a single window specific SGP, or with current SGP percentiles based on the most recent assessment data.