Data sgp leverages longitudinal student assessment data to produce statistical growth plots (SGP) that measure students’ relative progress as compared to academic peers with similar prior test scores. While these SGPs are an important performance metric for teachers and parents, the calculations involved in their production can be complex, particularly when a student’s assessment history contains multiple tests from different testing windows or subject areas. The resulting growth estimates may also be vulnerable to spurious correlations in the data due to school or instructor characteristics or the design of the baseline cohort.

To address these issues, the data sgp package provides a set of functions to simplify SGP analyses. These functions, abcSGP and prepareSGP, combine the steps needed to calculate a student’s student growth percentile with the steps required to create an SGP graph from this data. This simplifies the source code needed to conduct these analyses and reduces the time required for operational analyses.

The SGP package requires access to longitudinal, time dependent student assessment data in WIDE format. The exemplar data sets sgpData_LONG and sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER, provide an example of this data format and demonstrate how the SGP package’s higher level functions can be used to simplify these analysis. The sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER data set contains variables like VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, YEAR, ID, SCALE_SCORE and GRADE associated with each student’s assessment occurrences for a given content area. The sgpData_LONG data set includes additional variables like DISTRICT, YEAR, POSITIONS and INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER which are used to match students to instructors.

Using SGP, educators can identify students who are making less than expected progress and make necessary instructional adjustments. In addition, SGP can help teachers and administrators better understand how their students have grown as compared to their academic peers, providing a more accurate picture of how well a program is serving its students. This can allow educators to refine their achievement targets and goals so that they are more realistic.

Educators can also use SGP to identify high performing students and determine how to best support their growth. In addition, they can use SGP to evaluate accelerated programs and ensure that most students are on track to meet their achievement targets. This is especially helpful for identifying students who need extra academic challenge and support to reach their potential. SGPs can also inform instructional practices, school/district improvement initiatives and support broader research efforts. In all of these cases, SGP should be seen as a valuable tool that can help improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools and districts across the country. To achieve this goal, it is essential that educators have the right tools to easily analyze and interpret their students’ SGPs. SGPs provide educators with the information they need to better serve their students and communities.