Student Growth Percentiles (SGP) allow teachers and administrators to measure how far their students have advanced on state assessments relative to their peers academically. Teachers and districts use SGP scores as an indicator to gauge whether students are making expected gains, require extra help or are falling behind their classmates.
SGPs do not serve as a simple pass or fail score, but rather serve as a measure of progress over time that provides educators an opportunity to assess and adjust instructional strategies. Through the NJ SMART portal, teachers and administrators alike can access SGP data easily to track individual student growth as well as class averages.
Utilizing Student Growth Percentile data is simple and straightforward. When you open up a session of data sgp, there will be two tabs visible – SGP Data tab and Evaluating Data tab. SGP Data contains your SGP data for that year, including student growth percentile calculations done during that year for all students taking the state assessment test in question. The Evaluating Data tab features all evaluation related information relating to SGP.
Each year, new SGP data are calculated and stored in the SGPdata tool as part of the SGP software suite. This tool offers users wide and long format data sets to help set up analyses using SGP. The sgpData_WIDE and sgpData_LONG datasets represent student assessment data in WIDE and LONG formats respectively. This data set specifies that SGP data be organized into a WIDE format where each row represents one case/student while columns indicate variables associated with them at various times. The SGPData_LONG data set indicates that SGP data in its LONG format. Each row represents one student over time. Furthermore, the SGPdata tool includes an embedded SGPstateData table for use with higher level SGP functions that focus on state specific meta-data (such as ABCSGP, PrepareSGP or AnalyzeSGP).
Each year of SGP calculations involves computing historical growth trajectories for every student in order to provide valuable information that can help teachers and school leaders determine the most effective course of action for supporting each learner’s learning; including whether to extend time or accelerate instruction. Furthermore, these trajectories serve as projections of each learner’s future proficiency level.
As projections are based on trends in statewide performance data, it is not unusual for Student Growth Project (SGP) results to vary slightly year to year due to unforeseen events like Covid-19 pandemic-induced dramatic performance shifts or more subtle adjustments within typical student performance trends.