Unlike traditional student assessment reports, which indicate a single measure of achievement, Student Growth Percentiles (SGP) are measures of the extent to which students are improving or declining in their performance over time. SGPs show how well a student is progressing relative to their academic peers across the state. This information can help educators identify the most challenging learners and make the necessary adjustments to improve their outcomes.

Data SGP is a tool that allows district administrators to easily create and share interactive SGP reports online using their own data sets. Administrators can quickly select a year, subject, and group of students to view individual and aggregated results in a variety of formats, including bubble maps, scatter plots, scatter graphs, line graphs, and table reports. Detailed report data can also be exported to spreadsheets for further analysis. The reports are designed to be user friendly and require minimal technical knowledge or support.

SGP analyses are conducted using the R statistical software environment. The SGP package includes lower level functions (studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections) as well as higher level functions (wrapper functions for the lower levels) for running operational SGP analyses. To run SGP analyses, a computer with the R software installed is required. R is free and is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

If you have questions about how to use the data sgp tools, please contact the OSPI Student Growth Help Desk by email or by calling 1-800-672-4639.

What are SGPs?

SGPs provide a snapshot of a student’s academic progress over time by comparing their performance on an MCAS test to the performance of their academic peers. The comparison is based on how they are doing compared to their peers in their grade level and content area. While SGPs are an important indicator of a student’s learning, they should be interpreted in conjunction with other indicators of a student’s progress, such as academic achievement and graduation rates.

In order to use the data sgp, districts must have access to the MCAS test data and the student demographic and performance variables used for SGP calculations. OSPI provides these data sets in the sgptData_LONG and sgpdata_long data sets. These data sets include the SGP calculation variables VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, YEAR, ID, SCALE_SCORE, GRADE and ACHIEVEMENT_LEVEL (required for running student growth projections). The sgpdata_long data set also includes the student name/first/last and teacher number lookup variables, sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_STUDENT and sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER, which are needed to create a summary student level student aggregate by the prepareSGP function.

Authorized users can drill down to student details that display multiple additional data points, such as each student’s SGP and corresponding growth level (high, low or typical); student demographics; scale score data and performance levels; and attendance rate in the growth year. Detailed explanations for each of these data points are included in the student growth reporting website. In addition to viewing the SGP results, authorized users can export data for each student in a group to a tab-delimited file.