What is Data Sgp?

Data sgp is the collective of aggregated student performance data collected over time that teachers and administrators use to understand and support students. This information includes individual-level measures like test scores and growth percentiles, as well as aggregated school/district level metrics such as class size and attendance rates. This information can help identify areas of concern, inform classroom practices, evaluate schools/districts and support broader research initiatives.

The data sgp package leverages longitudinal student assessment data to produce statistical growth plots (SGPs). SGPs measure students’ relative progress compared to their academic peers by using a growth standard established with prior assessment score histories and covariates.

While there are many SGP analysis methods available, this particular approach is particularly powerful because it enables schools to establish multi-year growth standards based on official state achievement targets/goals. This is important as it communicates to stakeholders that proficiency must be achieved within a specific period of time and provides the framework for schools to prioritize improvement efforts over multiple years.

In addition to SGP analyses, the sgpData package also supports the creation of growth projections for groups of students. These projections can be used to evaluate the impact of a particular policy on student outcomes or to support professional development initiatives by identifying which teachers may need additional training/support to reach a specific group of students.

To conduct SGP/growth projection analyses, the sgpData package contains two lower level functions – studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections. Both of these functions require a longitudinal, vertically scaled student data set in WIDE format with at least 5 years of assessment occurrences and a single unique student identifier. The sgpData_LONG data set (available via the “sgpData” tab of the educator report) is an example of a typical longitudinal data set that can be used with these functions.

The sgpData package also contains higher level functions abcSGP and updateSGP that combine the functionality of the lower level functions into a single function call, simplifying the source code associated with operational analyses. Additionally, the sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER lookup table can be used to associate instructor details with each student’s assessment record. To use the sgpData package, you will need a computer with the R software environment installed. This is freely available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux and can be downloaded from the CRAN website. We recommend that you spend some time familiarizing yourself with the basic features of R before beginning any SGP analyses. Additional documentation, vignettes and examples are available on the sgpData GitHub site.