Data SGP provides teachers and administrators with a snapshot of student growth relative to academic peers. The information can help educators gauge if students grew more than, less than, or about as expected; and highlight areas of strength or weakness for individual students.
The Student Growth Percentile, or SGP, measures average progress that students make on state assessments compared to their academic peers. It’s calculated using the median (mean) Student Growth Percentile score of all grade 5 students who have taken at least two state tests and does not correspond directly with any specific subject or course performance indicators.
SGP scores come in two formats, Window Specific SGP for tracking student growth across specific time frames, and Current SGP to provide a snapshot of a student’s most recent growth. Both formats use similar information including current and previous year scores on state tests as well as teacher of record in each class and course roster submission in NJ SMART to calculate SGPs.
All data sgp analyses are designed to be straightforward and user-friendly, with most of the work spent preparing data as part of preparation work for analysis. If any issues arise during analysis process they usually can be traced back to preparation issues.
Lower level functions that perform calculations involving studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections require WIDE formatted data; while higher level functions like sgpStateData and sgpData which serve as wrappers for lower level SGP calculations are designed to work with LONG formatted data. As such, we advise setting up and managing operational analyses using this format of information.
Data SGP uses historical growth trajectories of Star examination takers to predict how many additional points each student needs per year in order to attain or maintain proficiency and update projections regularly so as to provide students with access to the most up-to-date data available.
Data SGP not only offers SGP estimates but also a host of other useful data. This includes an interactive list that shows students who have not made sufficient progress toward reaching proficiency yet and those for whom the current projection suggests they might. Furthermore, Data SGP compares students’ estimated progressions toward proficiency across subjects and grades and also displays average progress rates in each.
SGP measures student progress relative to academic peers across the state by comparing current year test scores with last year test scores from their prior school year. Each student receives an SGP score from 1 to 99; higher numbers indicate more relative growth – for instance a student with a score of 85 has experienced more development than 75% of his or her academic peers. For more technical details please visit our SGP Technical Resources page.