Students across the state have been using data sgp to measure their own progress as well as that of their classmates and schools. This new information provides a powerful tool for educators to use in setting achievement targets and goals for their students as they work towards meeting those targets. It also helps identify high achieving students as well as those who need additional support to succeed.
The data sgp provides an important additional measure of student learning that supplements existing performance measures, such as statewide test scores and graduation rates. Because of the unique way in which SGPs are calculated, they offer a more accurate and complete picture of student progress than either of these existing measures alone.
Specifically, SGPs are percentages of students’ MCAS growth compared to the average of students with similar MCAS performance histories. Students with higher SGPs are growing faster than students with lower SGPs. For example, a sixth grade student who has an SGP of 90th percentile means that the student’s MCAS score grew as fast as 90% of the students in her class with similar MCAS performance histories.
A student’s SGP can be viewed on the BAA Secure Site by entering the student identifier and selecting the desired assessment year. The resulting report will provide the student’s current SGP and a history of previous SGPs over the same time period.
SGPs will be available for students in grades 4th through 11th starting this year. However, the data will not be available for educator evaluation purposes until 2018/19. This gives teachers three more years to become familiar with the information and to ensure that there are sufficient stability measures before they are used for high-stakes evaluations.
One challenge to using data sgp is that the distribution of student SGPs does not follow a normal curve. Instead, students tend to cluster around the median. When comparing school-level mean and median SGPs (using 2017 math SGPs), the standard deviation of means is almost four points smaller than the standard deviation of medians.
This is an expected result of the SGP system, but it can still cause confusion for educators. Fortunately, there are several ways to make sense of the data and to reduce the impact of outliers. For instance, using mean SGPs grouped by deciles will produce a distribution that looks more like a normal bell-shape curve than the distribution produced when using medians. The analysis vignette includes instructions for using the WIDE data format sgpData for this purpose. Additionally, a more comprehensive SGP data analysis wiki is under development that will describe how to analyze individual student, school and district level data. This will include a detailed explanation of how to calculate and display a range of SGP metrics including standard deviations, distributions and percentiles. The wiki will be posted on this website in early 2016. The new SGP wiki is designed to be as user friendly as possible and will be accessible by anyone with an internet connection.