Data sgp is a large database of student performance data that has been used to analyze student growth and achievement. It is a valuable resource for teachers and administrators who want to identify students who are growing less quickly than expected, or are not making the academic gains they should be. The database also allows educators to see how their students compare to their peers nationally and across grade levels.
The database is organized into two categories: longitudinal data sets (WIDE format) and window specific data sets (LONG format). The SGPdata package installed when you download the SGP software includes exemplar WIDE and LONG data sets, sgpData and sgpData_LONG, to help you set up your SGP data. Each case/row in the longitudinal data represents a unique student, and columns represent variables associated with that student at different times.
SGP measures student progress by comparing a student’s achievement level to that of his or her academic peers nationwide. It uses the most recent results of a student’s test scores from the State of Michigan, as well as his or her prior performance on national assessments like the PSSA and SAT. The result is a student growth percentile (SGP), which is the percentage of students who are growing faster than the given student.
The SGP software enables users to access the database and conduct their own analyses with it. The analysis can be done using the lower level functions studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections or the higher level function prepareSGP. prepareSGP is designed to simplify the coding involved in conducting operational SGP analyses. It takes a number of steps required to run the lower level analyses and wraps them into one function call, making the code much easier to read.
It’s a little too soon to call it big data, but it’s getting there. The SGP database assembles unprecedented amounts of information for the questions we have at hand but, by comparison to a global analysis of Facebook interactions, it is still fairly modest in size.
It is a powerful tool for evaluating student achievement and growth over time, but it must be interpreted cautiously. While SGP provides an objective way to assess a student’s performance relative to others, it cannot tell us how much the student has learned in any particular subject. The SGP data set does not include a complete transcript of a student’s learning, nor does it provide any contextual information about the student’s background or circumstances. To get the full picture, you need to combine it with other sources of student data, such as course enrollments and demographics. Fortunately, many online communities are already working on assembling these types of data sets and providing them to educators. The SGP project hopes to expand on these efforts in the future.