Data SGP and SGP Data Sets
DESE provides school and district-level data sets for students in grades 4 through 8 and grade 10, including student growth percentiles (SGP) for ELA and mathematics. An SGP measures student growth relative to academic peers with similar test score histories on subject-matter tests, tracking over time a student’s growth as they move toward meeting an established growth target (e.g. 75% of peers).
SGPs are calculated with longitudinal student assessment data. To create each student’s SGP, up to five years of test score history – including Badger year- are utilized, including those tested by MCAS tests: English language arts (ELA), math, science, social studies and health. An SGP for each subject represents the average of their growth over five years of testing in that subject area.
An SGP for any student is determined by comparing his or her current scale score with the average of the top and bottom quartile of students who took the previous assessment. This method takes into account that not all students begin at equal levels and that different assessments have different degrees of difficulty, meaning an SGP may be more or less accurate depending on which assessment was used despite starting scores being similar across assessments.
When using the data sgp command, an SGPdata package is installed that contains an example WIDE format data set (sgpData) and LONG format data set (sgpData_LONG) that you can use for SGP analyses. While both formats differ slightly in appearance, all functions run equally on either format; although for operational use you might prefer formatting your data in LONG format as this provides greater efficiency for long duration analyses runs.
The data sgp command allows you to generate student- and teacher-level SGP plots for any content area. To do this, an anonymized data set with student/instructor lookup variables must be available. This data set can be downloaded on this website in the sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER file, with seven essential variables including VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, YEAR, ID, SCALE_SCORE GRADE and ACHIEVEMENT_LEVEL for running student growth projections. In addition, its companion file (sgpData_LONG) also provides teacher lookup information associated with each test record of each student tested; both files can be found here for download.