Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) provide an objective measure of students’ progress toward mastering state standards. Calculated using up to two years’ of MCAS test results, SGPs compare a student’s performance against that of academic peers with similar history in terms of both age and grade level based on scores obtained on past MCAS exams taken within their subject and grade area; such groupings take into account demographic characteristics such as gender or income as well as educational programs like sheltered English immersion or special education programs.
The SGPdata package contains four sample data sets designed for use in SGP analyses. The first, known as sgpData, specifies data in WIDE format that is utilized by lower level SGP functions like studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections; sgpData_LONG and sgptData_LONG are respectively LONG formats utilized by higher level functions like abcSGP, prepareSGP and analyzeSGP respectively.
Finally, sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER provides a teacher-student lookup table utilized by SGPteacher function to produce aggregates for teachers. All four sample datasets can be found on GitHub.
As an introduction to this topic, this article offers a brief overview of how SGPs are created and describes some key features of the SGPdata package for analyzing SGP data. Furthermore, this package supports various ways of visualizing and reporting SGP information through charts, tables and an interactive web dashboard.
SGP should not replace traditional assessment reports, but rather serve to supplement them and help inform educational decisions. While traditional reports offer information about current levels of achievement, SGP measures growth since previous years.
SGPs not only measure student performance but also identify potential outcomes based on past academic achievement and current level of performance. Possible outcomes can range from high school completion, college enrollment and vocational training programs; various instructional strategies or interventions may also be employed to support growth toward desired results.
As part of an overall approach to understanding student growth percentiles, it’s essential to keep in mind that percentile rankings change from year to year and cannot be directly compared. Thus, when interpreting changes between years in terms of Student Growth Percentiles (SGP), any variations should be treated with caution, typically only 10 point differences are considered significant. Furthermore, growth percentages represent both achievement and effort so it cannot solely be attributed to either achievement or effort; even when growth has occurred across content areas and grades simultaneously; they must also be taken into consideration alongside indicators like class rank, course grades, SAT/ACT scores when viewing SGP data in relation to other indicators like class rank, course grades or SAT/ACT scores etc.