October 15, 2024

Data governance is a set of practices that ensures an organization’s data is handled correctly, from collection to storage to usage and beyond. It includes everything that enables an organization to meet its regulatory and compliance obligations, protect sensitive data from outside threats or malicious insiders, and ensure the quality of the data they use for decision making. By implementing strong data governance practices, organizations can reduce the risk of noncompliance with existing or future regulations and build trust with customers and partners.

How SGPs Work

A student’s growth percentile on the Badger Exam is based on their performance against other students who were administered that same test. This means that a sixth grade student who scored 300 on the English language arts (ELA) exam this year is compared to other students in her class who scored the same. This allows students to be accurately ranked against their peers regardless of the differences between assessments.

The resulting student growth percentile is reported on the dashboard and can be viewed by teachers, administrators, parents, and others. Students are grouped by their grade and tested subject and the resulting growth percentiles can be compared to each other, showing a snapshot of the student’s progress over time.

Separate SGPs are calculated for each grade and tested subject and are based on the student’s performance against other students who have taken the same assessment. This allows students to be accurately ranked by their peers across the state regardless of the difference between assessments. This also allows a student with a high score on one assessment to demonstrate low growth while another student with a lower starting point on an assessment shows high growth.

This information can be used to identify areas of strength and focus improvement in the classroom or school. The data can also be analyzed to show the impact of different curriculum programs or instructional strategies on student learning. In addition, this information can be compared to the value-added data that is used in the state accountability system.

Using Data SGP

The SGP package was developed for the R software environment and is available free of charge for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. It is recommended that users of the SGP package have some familiarity with R and are comfortable running commands from a command line. It is possible to access and manipulate the data from the SGP package without an R installation, but some of the higher level functions that allow for more detailed analyses are only accessible when using R.

The SGP package can be used to calculate mean SGPs at the teacher, school, district, or subgroup levels. To find the mean, the individual SGPs for a group are averaged to provide an estimate of the typical growth for that group. For example, a teacher’s mean SGP indicates that on average her students performed better than 51 percent of similar students. This information can be useful to help teachers identify the strengths and weaknesses of their instruction.