Data SGP (Student Growth Profiles) is an assessment tool used to gauge relative student growth relative to academic peers. Teachers and administrators can use SGP scores as a yardstick to assess whether an individual student is growing more or less than expected, and also whether progress towards expected goals has occurred or not.
SGP scores are calculated by comparing a student’s most recent assessment score with one they took before, then comparing that difference with those within their cohort whose SGP has previously been calculated. The resultant value between 1-99 indicates whether this student is growing faster, slower or at an equal pace as their academic peers.
As the most accurate way of interpreting an SGP score for any student is using their most up-to-date data available, we provide students with their current SGP score on a quarterly basis along with averaged cohort average scores. As not all schools administer tests at once and scores can fluctuate between testing windows, our goal is to equip teachers and parents with up-to-date information so that informed decisions about instruction and planning decisions can be made.
Utilizing wide format data with SGP analyses is generally straightforward. For more detailed guidance on using WIDE formats like sgpData with SGP analyses, please refer to the SGP Data Analysis Vignette.
Underneath this example’s sgpData table is each student’s unique ID; while five additional columns, GRADE_2013, GRADE_2014, GRADE_2015, GRADE_2016 and GRADE_2017 provide MCAS scale score histories associated with those students across five years of testing – these may still have identical SGP scores but may belong to very distinct academic peer groups.
Our SGP data, available to the public, will not only be utilized for SGP calculations but will also serve as the foundation of other geochemical databases. This project’s primary objective is to migrate much of this data into permanent repositories that will enable future research in Earth science and paleoclimatology. As well as making data easier to access, this project will create common terms and dictionaries across datasets to facilitate future reusing of this valuable information. This project is especially essential to long-term geochemical data preservation. Future applications could combine databases from these archives for new applications, while we hope that researchers collaborate with us and help access significant amounts of metadata and legacy data which would not otherwise have been available without our joint research effort.