SGPs are calculated using standardized test scores and student covariate data, providing an alternative to percentile ranking that takes more into account about past testing history than traditional percentiles. Our academic growth model utilizes SGPs extensively, helping support school and district accountability while contributing towards measures of teacher/leader effectiveness for both TKES and LKES systems.
Take for instance a fifth grader named Simon who scored 300 on this year’s state English Language Arts (ELA) assessment; her Standard Growth Performance (SGP) would show that she made 70 point progress since last year compared to when compared with similar groups of students starting out at similar levels as herself; without knowing their relative ranks in this group it is impossible to know whether their achievement level was adequate or not.
SGPs can not only assist schools in identifying areas of strength, but they are also invaluable in showing the amount of growth required to reach an official state achievement target/goal. Multi-year growth standards form an essential component of state accountability systems; educators can use SGPs as an interactive way of showing stakeholders just how complex attaining proficiency within any specified period is.
OSPI staff stand ready to offer training and assistance throughout this process. An increasing number of districts and states are adopting SGP methodology in order to enhance instruction quality for their students, taking full advantage of its benefits for education. OSPI offers training services as part of this effort.
This GitHub repository houses the SGP data used to create teacher and student reports, including an anonymized list of teachers that taught a specific student in an area during a specified school year. Each test record may have multiple teachers associated with it, while one teacher may be assigned several students at once.
The SGPdata package utilizes this data set to calculate and display student growth percentiles, with its source being the sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER table. This table is created for every teacher and their students, and contains their teacher ID number as well as each unique test record that each has completed. The table is then used to generate a student-teacher index for each content area, yielding an overall mean growth percentile for all of a teacher’s students and ranking among all teachers within the state for Teacher Growth Percentile (TGP) analysis. MGP scores can serve as an invaluable metric to compare teacher performance and identify top performers within an educational system. Teachers with higher MGP scores tend to receive greater recognition and advancement opportunities within it compared to VAM-based measures which don’t take account of classroom composition; MGP measures are more sensitive and therefore more appropriate for teacher evaluation purposes.