The data sgp is a powerful tool that allows educators to examine student growth and progress in relative terms. The data sgp can help educators to identify students who need additional support and help them determine which students are growing the most in their classrooms. This information is particularly important when schools and districts are trying to identify high-quality teachers, as well as to measure educator effectiveness.

Several factors contribute to the variability in true SGPs, including test-taking strategies and student background characteristics. The fact that true SGPs are related to student covariates is one of the reasons that interpreting them at the teacher or school level can be difficult, even when the estimates are free from excessive estimation error. Fortunately, a simple model of longitudinal item-level data using latent regression with Monte Carlo methods can provide valuable insight into the properties of true SGP distributions.

These models are easy to interpret and allow us to explore a range of features that have not been investigated in previous work. For example, we can see that student background variables account for a significant percentage of the variance in true SGPs. We also can see that the mean difference in SGPs between a student and his or her classmates can vary by grade and even by cohort. In the case of accelerated programs, this variation can be explained by a small number of students who cannot keep pace with their academic peers.

To avoid the potential bias associated with interpreting aggregated SGPs as indicators of educator performance, we recommend that schools and districts use value-added models to regress student test scores on teacher fixed effects, prior test scores, and student background variables. This approach eliminates the potentially problematic relationships between true SGPs and student background characteristics, while allowing teachers to be evaluated on their overall contribution to student learning.

Educators can then compare and report SGPs to the public in a variety of ways, including by window, by dimension, and by grade. For each window, current SGP is calculated by comparing the most recent assessment to at least one prior assessment from an earlier testing window (the dates of these windows need not match the school or district’s school year). A “division” of SGP values is then assigned to each student, where lower numbers indicate more relative growth and higher numbers indicate less relative growth.

The sgpData spreadsheet, installed when you install the SGP package, provides an easy way to view a student’s current SGP and their division. It can also be used to create custom reports and graphs. It can be downloaded from the sgpData tab at the top of this page. This spreadsheet is commonly used by teachers and administrators to inform instructional decisions and evaluate school/district performance. It is also used by students and their families to gauge how much they are growing. This spreadsheet can be customized to include more details about a student, such as gender and socioeconomic status, which are not included in the summary report generated by SGP.