Data sgp is an important tool to help understand student growth. It combines the student’s current test scores with their prior year’s score and compares it to students who performed similar to them (student growth percentiles). Data sgp also allows you to see how many points your student has gained in one year, which is an indicator of whether they are making progress toward proficiency or not.
SGPs are norm-referenced statistics, meaning that they compare each student’s current year score to the scores of students with similar prior scale score history (academic peers). The CDE website describes SGPs as telling us “how a student’s growth on a state test compares to that of other students with similar previous test performance.”
Because SGPs are normed, they can vary depending upon the norm group used to compute them. Colorado currently uses the current cohort of students as a norm group for each grade. This results in mean SGPs and school SGP averages that are lower than those produced with baseline-referenced or cohort-referenced methods.
While there are some clear advantages to using SGPs, they do present a number of challenges and limitations that need to be addressed before they can be fully operationalized and used by schools and educators. First, SGPs require a minimum of three years of stable assessment data in order to generate meaningful percentiles. Ideally, the tests administered in each of these years would be directly comparable. Second, SGPs are based on an estimation process that introduces error into the comparison of current and prior test scores. The resulting errors can be large, especially for students in grades that have not had a long testing history or whose previous test scores are not available.
These errors can be mitigated by analyzing SGPs with additional control variables that take into account the variation in previous test performance, such as using adjusted scale score percentages or calculating a trend line with the previous year’s score to control for regression to the mean. However, these additional analyses are more complicated and require more time to prepare and execute.
While the SGP reports produced by the CDE are based on test data collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to remember that these analyses can only provide background context and results from the previous testing environment and do not address any of the issues specific to the disruptions in the education system during this time period. The data sgp is an important tool to use to help make sense of the new SGPs and their implications for student learning. It is imperative that schools and districts carefully review the results of these analyses to ensure they are using the most accurate and up-to-date information available to them.