How to Use the Data SGP Tool
The data sgp tool provides a collection of student performance information for teachers and administrators. This includes individual-level measures like test scores and growth percentiles, as well as aggregated measures at the school/district level including class size, attendance rates and graduation rates. This information can be used to identify areas for improvement, inform classroom practices, assess teacher/staff effectiveness, evaluate schools and districts, and support broader research initiatives.
Students grow over time when they are provided with high quality instruction. Statistical growth plots (SGP) provide an efficient way to calculate student progress by comparing student achievement data with a defined growth standard. This allows educators to understand whether students are growing faster or slower than their academic peers and whether they are close to or far from reaching a desired target.
SGP leverages longitudinal student assessment data to produce a growth projection for each student, which compares a student’s progress with those of academic peers who have similar prior test score histories. This provides educators with valuable growth information in percentages, which are familiar to most teachers and parents. SGP calculations are complex, and constructing these plots from students’ standardized test score history requires an extensive amount of computational resources.
ARM’s SGP observatory is located on 160 acres of cattle pasture and wheat fields southeast of Lamont, Oklahoma. At the core of the observatory is a heavily instrumented Central Facility that collects and distributes continuous measurements from instruments deployed across the site. The observatory also hosts guest instruments during field research campaigns and supports atmospheric modeling.
The sgpData table is a WIDE format data set, which means that each row represents a single student and the columns represent variables associated with the student at different times. It contains five years of student assessment data for each student and a lookup table called sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER, which is an instructor-lookup table that connects instructors to students via unique identifiers in their test records. The sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER table is invaluable to districts because students may have multiple instructors in one content area during a given year and SGP needs an accurate way of assigning those students to a specific instructor for that content area.
Using the sgpData table is straightforward, but it is important to understand the structure of the data before attempting an analysis. For example, the first column in the table, ID, provides the unique student identifier, while the last five columns, GRADE_2013, GRADE_2014, GRADE_2015, and GRADE_2016, each record the scale score associated with the grade level at that point in time. It is also important to note that while a student can have one instructor associated with their sgpData record for each of the five years required for baseline-referenced SGP, there is no guarantee that this will be the same instructor for every assessment period. Therefore, an instructor-based SGP will be more vulnerable to spurious correlations. For more detailed guidance on working with WIDE format data sets, please consult the SGP data analysis vignette.