What Is Data SGP?
Data sgp is a tool that allows teachers to view students’ growth over time on statewide assessments by comparing them to their academic peers. A student’s score on a state assessment represents the number of points the student scored above or below the 50th percentile of his or her academic peers. Students’ academic peers are identified using the same criteria as those used to identify high-performing schools, including gender, income, sheltered English immersion programs, and other factors that may affect performance on a state assessment.
Data SGP is released by the Department of Education following each year’s statewide testing. Districts submit course roster submission data through NJ SMART and the student information system (SIS) during the summer of each year in order to have their students’ SGP scores calculated. During this process, the district identifies the instructor(s) for each of their students. SGP scores are then mailed to each teacher along with the associated student course assignments.
While SGP data can be helpful in understanding the data for a particular student, there are several key things to keep in mind when reviewing the data. First, it is important to remember that SGPs are not a normal distribution, but rather a distribution with a clustered structure. This means that there will be a large number of students at the top and bottom ends of the curve and a smaller number in the middle. This is expected and provides additional information on the strength of a student’s performance.
It is also important to note that while SGPs can provide useful insight, it should be remembered that they are not a measure of a student’s skill level. The SGP is a measure of the change in a student’s score on an assessment over time, and while it can be indicative of a student’s ability, it should be considered in conjunction with other measures of student achievement, such as proficiency or grade-level performance.
SGP analyses require access to a large amount of data and can be complicated to manage. To simplify the process of conducting SGP analyses, we recommend that all data be obtained in long format and that users utilize the lower level functions studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections as well as higher level functions such as prepareSGP and updateSGP, which “wrap” the lower level functions into a single function call, making the analyses easier to run and manage.
Managing long format data is also simpler than managing WIDE format data and all higher level SGP functions, including prepareSGP, assume that the user has already provided their data in this manner. This is the preferred method for running operational SGP analyses and is a recommended approach for most users.