Student Growth Percentile (SGP) Description
A student growth percentile (SGP) describes a student’s growth compared to other students with similar prior test scores. It’s a useful indicator for teachers and parents to understand how students are progressing in their academic career.
It also can provide an indication of the potential for a student’s growth to continue to accelerate in the future, especially if they are enrolled in courses that are designed to help them improve their academic performance. For example, teachers who are working with high-needs students may be able to predict the likelihood that their students will succeed in higher level math courses by looking at their SGP.
In addition, teachers and administrators can use SGPs to evaluate whether a school or classroom is suited to the needs of students with different backgrounds. For example, if a student is from a low-performing school, a teacher might be more likely to recommend that the student switch schools or to take additional classes.
The SGP package has many functions that calculate student growth percentiles and projections of growth in different subject areas. These functions can be run against a variety of data sources, including student records, teacher-prescribed assessment items, and standardized tests administered to students.
To use the SGP package, the user must first ensure that their data is in the correct format. This means that they should either set their data in WIDE or LONG format.
This is important because the lower level SGP functions in the package, studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections, require WIDE formatted data whereas the higher level functions, wrappers for these lower level functions, need LONG formatted data.
If the student data are not in the proper format, there will be errors that will occur during analysis. Typically, these errors will return to data preparation issues, so it’s important to make sure that all data are in the correct format before running any analyses.
The SGP package also has a vignette that explains how to prepare your data for use in SGP calculations. This vignette is available on the project’s GitHub repository.
For more information on how to prepare your data, visit the vignette’s page.
When using the SGP package, we recommend supplying your data in the following formats:
In general, we strongly suggest that you set your student data in a long format so that all the basic SGP analysis can be done. This is because most of the capabilities in the SGP package are built around the ability of the user to supply data in this way.
However, in some cases, we have found that students’ growth percentiles can be calculated with data in a short format. This is due to the fact that the student growth percentiles for students in less effective schools are often very small.
Therefore, if you have any questions about how to get your student data in the proper format, please contact us at support@gacor.io and we can work with you to ensure that your student data are ready for analysis.