MCAS Student Growth Percentiles
Student Growth Percentiles (SGP) describe a student’s growth on a given assessment compared to students with similar prior test scores. SGP provides information that is valuable to teachers and families, because it is based on a familiar metric of percentiles that are easy for many people to understand.
SGP data is a powerful tool for educators to help them identify specific areas of strength and weakness for individual students. SGP can be used to guide teacher planning for instruction, as well as assessing the effectiveness of a school or district’s curriculum. Additionally, SGP is a valuable tool for data teams to use in their work with educator performance and achievement reports.
SGP information can be accessed by visiting the MCAS Dashboard. Click on a Student’s name in the Dashboard and scroll down to “Reports” to view their growth report. The sgp report shows a student’s SGP for each assessment section and is broken down by subject area and grade level. The sgp report also displays a student’s current scaled score along with their growth rate and the percentage of their prior test scores that they have achieved.
In order to calculate a student’s SGP, the MCAS system uses a comparison model that compares a student’s current scaled score with those of their academic peers who have taken previous versions of the same subject-matter test. The academic peers are identified based on their scores on the WKCE, Forward Exam or MCAS in grades 3-8.
The sgpData_LONG formatted data set is an anonymized, panel data set of 5 years of vertically scaled, assessment data in LONG format. This exemplar data set models the format of the data that is used for operational analyses such as studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections.
Note that this dataset includes the 2014-15 school year. This was the only year that the Badger Exam was administered, and the statewide performance on this assessment differed greatly from both the WKCE and the Forward Exam. Therefore, statewide average SGPs will be lower than those reported for the other two assessments in this sample.
The sgptData_LONG data set is an anonymized, panel data of 8 windows (3 windows annually) of assessment data in LONG format for three content areas (Early Literacy, Mathematics and Reading). This exemplar data set models the format of data that is used for SGP analyses such as studentGrowthPercentiles, studentGrowthProjections and aggregateSGP. There are seven required variables for using this data set: VALID_CASE, CONTENT_AREA, YEAR, ID, SCALE_SCORE, GRADE and ACHIEVEMENT_LEVEL (required for running student growth projections). Additional variable definitions are provided in the SGP package documentation.