Data sgp is an important file format used to store and analyze student assessment data. It contains information on student achievement and teacher performance. Its use is widespread in educational settings. It is a common data format that can be read by many programs and applications. It is a simple, text-based file that stores data for an underlying object (either a student identifier or a test score). It can be used to create data matrices and other types of graphs. It can also be used to create projections or trajectories for students who are assessed multiple times over the course of their school career.
Educators who use SGP in their evaluations rely on their SGP scores to determine how well they are performing and to compare their performance with other educators. However, these scores are estimated from standardized test scores that are error-prone measures of the latent achievement attributes under consideration. These errors make estimated SGPs noisy measures of true SGPs, and they can cause misinterpretation of aggregated SGPs at the educator level as indicators of educator effectiveness.
In addition, the sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER database includes an anonymized student-instructor lookup table that associates an instructor with each of the student’s test records. The lookup table also indicates which of the student’s test records have been taught by each of the instructors. This information can be used to identify teachers who are responsible for a given student’s achievement growth.
To address these issues, this section specifies a model for latent achievement attributes and defines true SGPs under it. It demonstrates that such SGPs are distributionally normal and have positive covariance with the previous test score, even when the prior and current test scores have different reliability l. The model can be implemented with the SGP software package.
Results from several studies support the validity of SGPs as a measure of student growth. SGPs provide a more equitable way to evaluate student achievement and teacher effectiveness because they rank students against their academic peers, regardless of differences in their initial level of achievement. In addition, SGPs are reported in percentile terms that are familiar to teachers and parents.
Despite these benefits, some educators remain skeptical about using SGPs in their evaluations. Some are concerned that the correlations between an educator’s expected SGPs and her classroom-level student covariates will be too large, leading to biased interpretations of the results. Others are concerned that SGPs will lead to unfair comparisons among educators by assigning disproportionate weight to the prior achievement levels of their students. To address these concerns, this article examines how to construct a statistical model that yields unbiased comparisons of educator SGPs. It then presents an example of how the SGP software package can be used to construct such a model for the NJSMART data set. The model can be used by other educational institutions that wish to evaluate student and teacher performance with SGPs.