Data SGP is an invaluable tool for educational stakeholders and can be used to identify students who need additional support in the classroom. It can also highlight areas of high achievement so that educators know where to focus efforts in order to help students achieve the highest levels of academic success. While data preparation is time consuming, once the initial work is completed, the analyses can be conducted relatively quickly and efficiently.

In most instances, student growth percentages (SGP) are calculated for each individual student who has taken at least two assessments within different testing windows. Current SGP is based on the most recent assessment and at least one prior test from an earlier testing window (Fall, Winter, or Spring; these tests do not have to be administered during the same school year). The number of instructors assigned to each test record is stored in sgpData as sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER; this allows for an easy lookup table that identifies the instructor responsible for the most student learning for each test record. This table can then be easily searched and sorted to identify the most effective teachers in a given class or group of students – a valuable tool for identifying teacher or school effectiveness.

To facilitate these types of analyses, sgpData contains several higher level functions that perform specific analysis tasks. While all of these higher level functions can be run with WIDE formatted data, it is generally recommended that LONG formatted data be used whenever possible for operational analyses. Managing LONG formatted data is much more simple than working with WIDE formatted data and many of the higher level functions, such as studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections, are designed to utilize long data formats for operational analyses.

In addition to higher level functions, sgpData includes a variety of lower level utility functions that can be used to quickly produce commonly requested reports or tables. These include percentile tables, instructor-based SGP percentiles, and SGP growth projections for both individuals and groups of students. These tools can be useful for both individual teachers and administrators as well as for comparing schools and districts.

sgpData also contains a set of higher level utilities that allow users to create state-specific student growth plot catalogs for all of the individual schools in a district or school system. These student growth plots can be displayed in PDF, PNG or JSON formats. The functionality that generates these student growth plots is incredibly powerful but takes considerable resources to operate, so we recommend that users only produce these reports when needed and use appropriate parallelization or other computing tools to reduce report production times. This functionality can be enabled by setting the sgpData_SGP_PLOTS option in sgpData_settings.