How to Analyze Student Growth Percentiles (SGP)
As a teacher or administrator, keeping track of student growth is of vital importance. Student growth percentiles (SGPs) provide teachers and administrators with a quick means of measuring how much a student’s score has increased or decreased compared to students with similar prior test scores (i.e. academic peers), making comparisons easy while showing whether someone is progressing faster or slower than expected compared with their academic peers. Furthermore, SGPs allow educators to quickly compare one student against their academic peers as well as quickly see whether one student is increasing faster or at the same rate than expected!
The SGP system takes advantage of Star examinees’ historical growth trajectories to assess possible growth trajectories for all students and project their present and future SGP scores accordingly, providing projections on both current and future scores, helping teachers and administrators understand why students may be either growing or stagnating. It is updated frequently with fresh data so that projections remain current.
To perform an SGP analysis, the first step should be creating a student profile of the person you wish to examine. This profile should include details such as their education history and academic achievements as well as any pertinent personal characteristics such as any disciplinary issues that exist between themselves and you – such as race.
After collecting all previous assessment results for the student you wish to analyze, such as prior and most recent assessments with associated scores and dates, you’ll use this data to calculate their Student Growth Potential (SGP).
Final step will be identifying SGP percentages which are most relevant in assessing student progress or growth. To do this, select an appropriate timeframe from the “Report Timeframe” drop-down menu and highlight those percentages which appear most often within your report.
The SGP software offers multiple ways of conducting analyses, depending on your needs and desired level of complexity. You may use lower level functions studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections or choose higher-level wrapper functions like prepareSGP and updateSGP that simplify source code requirements for analysis.
No matter which approach you use to analyze SGP data, be sure to conduct extensive tests prior to applying it with real data. While this can be time-consuming, this step is critical for accuracy of SGP analyses and supporting learning needs of your students more effectively. By investing time in developing and validating an SGP model you will provide more useful and accurate information for teachers and parents – ultimately improving outcomes and achievement for all children in school. Therefore it is vital for educators to access high-quality SGP models without cost. We aim to deliver this data free of charge!