Student Growth Percentile (SGP) measures student progress and growth by ranking their relative scale score change on an assessment relative to that of similarly starting points students. It provides us with a useful measure of academic achievement across diverse starting points at school.
SGPs can help analyze trends over time for an entire classroom, school or district. SGPs are particularly useful as normative measurements–they reflect typical growth in any given setting–however it is important to remember that these statistics only represent averages and may differ between years.
One year may see significant fluctuations in student performance for many reasons; such as the Covid-19 pandemic which had an enormous effect on growth rates – leading to many students showing less progress than anticipated. Conversely, participation may increase and cause the opposite effect; these fluctuations should be taken with caution and should not cause alarm.
SGP analyses can be completed using various software packages, with R being the most widely-used and straightforward tool. Available for Windows, OSX and Linux and downloadable through CRAN, there are plenty of resources for learning the different SGP functions on R.
Lower level functions in the sgpData package that provide SGP calculations such as studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections require WIDE formatted data; while higher-level functions like sgpDataSets and sgpDataReports offer a more convenient method to manage SGP data sets and perform various analyses; they expect LONG formatted input from users while offering wrappers to make this easier.
Authorized users can gain access to a visualization of Student Growth Points for schools, districts and individual students. The visualization presents SGPs using a bubble chart that displays averages per group. When hovering over any bubble it displays information on them such as number of students in that grouping as well as mean SGP and percent proficient or advanced status of that cohort of students. Furthermore, authorized users can drill down further onto an individual student detail page that offers more pieces of data.
SGPs should be read in conjunction with one another as this step shows the relative rank of student progress on an assessment (in this instance the state assessment) relative to all others with comparable starting points. This ranking serves as an effective measure of progress made and likelihood that proficiency or higher is reached, while also providing teachers with direction on where more attention needs to be focused on. SGPs can guide instruction and support for individual students; should performance fall below expectations, growth plans can also be developed accordingly.