SGP is a data analysis package for R statistical software environment that is available free to use across Windows, OSX and Linux systems. Although SGP is highly effective and powerful, its limitations and assumptions must be taken into consideration prior to its use in classroom settings. Educators should familiarize themselves with how SGP operates prior to using it for classroom purposes.
The SGP database houses multiproxy sedimentary geochemical data spanning Neoproterozoic through Paleozoic times, such as shale geochemistry data and global compilations of paleoclimatic proxies, which is then used for both model synthesis and validation purposes. Furthermore, researchers can access geochemical data that would otherwise not be easily available while taking advantage of tools provided by this project for analyzing datasets generated through its project.
How Can SGP Be Used? Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) can be created using historical growth trajectories on STAR assessments. Once created, SGPs can be compared with students with similar prior assessment scores (academic peers) to see where a student needs to progress to reach them academic peers. Teachers can also use SGPs as performance monitors and to ensure students meet state achievement targets/goals on time.
Many states have integrated School Growth Performance Index (SGP) data sets into their educator evaluation systems, like Michigan which uses SGPs to link teacher evaluations with measurable achievement goals and compare student performances against schools/districts across the state – helping districts understand where strengths or weaknesses lie within their student population.
SGP was designed as an open source project to be user friendly. Most of the time spent running SGP analyses is spent preparing data correctly and setting up software/hardware; once these tasks have been accomplished, running analyses only requires two steps and takes minutes if prepared properly; its wiki provides further instruction for doing this task.