The Student Growth and Learning Index is a collective of aggregated student growth and learning data collected over time to aid educators, parents, and researchers better understand student progress. It can also assist in measuring program or strategy effectiveness or supporting research initiatives/studies; specifically it includes individual-level measures like student test scores and growth percentiles, as well as aggregate measures at school- and district-level such as class size, attendance rates, graduation rates and grade levels, gender ethnicity or socioeconomic status.

Teachers need an accurate picture of student achievement to provide an accurate assessment. Percentiles provide this context and allow teachers to quickly determine where instruction must focus. The sgpData_STUDENTS_PERCENTILE_TABLE allows teachers to quickly analyze where their students need improvement by listing percentiles across a variety of subjects for easier analysis by teachers as they identify where improvement needs to take place.

SGPs measure student progress by comparing changes between assessments against averages among their academic peers (their prior scores). This information provides a more meaningful picture of a student’s progression than just raw scores alone, and SGP calculations use at least three assessments from different testing windows; though their calculations can be complex, the percentage results can easily be shared between teachers and parents alike.

SGP Data Set Installed when Installing SGP Package

At present, this module includes two functions for SGP analysis: abcSGP uses the exemplar data sets to perform SGP analyses in all years/content areas, and combineSGP is used to combine analyzeSGP’s results back into Demonstration_SGP@Data using input datasets sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER and sgpData_LONG as required inputs.

These two steps mirror those undertaken by an operational SGP analyst when conducting an SGP analysis. Additionally, the SGPdata package offers wrapper functions – abcSGP and updateSGP – which help simplify source code required by these steps by grouping them together into one function call. The sgpData_LONG and sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER data sets contain anonymized student-teacher pairing information. Each pair of records are associated with an instructor number that may be shared among multiple instructors. These instructors are then linked to student test records through the sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER lookup table, making it possible to perform SGP analyses that consider all teachers associated with one particular student over an entire year or content area. This data can then be used for running baseline and lagged student growth projections.