Providing student growth standards and describing how students are expected to achieve them is an essential step in helping educators evaluate a school’s performance. This requires a comprehensive data set which includes student assessments over time and provides a snapshot of each student’s performance in relation to his/her academic peers. The sgpData package offers an efficient means for organizing longitudinal (time dependent) student assessment data into statistical growth plots and tables. It contains five years of student data for each student in grades 1-3 and is available on the Star website under the “data” tab. There are two common formats of longitudinal data, WIDE and LONG, which differ in how they organize time dependent variables: WIDE format groups multiple tests for a single student into a single row with unique case IDs, while LONG format spreads test records across multiple rows for each student. The sgpData package contains examples of both formats.

The sgpData package also contains tables that allow users to examine how a student’s true SGP in different subjects and grade levels compares to other students. This can help determine what SGPs are most relevant for individual students and identify potential sources of error or bias in estimating SGPs. Table 3 displays example SGP differences by cohort and subject for math and ELA. The negative differences are generally related to student background characteristics such as participation in the FRL program and home language, while positive differences tend to be related to student participation in class and attendance behavior.

In addition to these comparison tables, the sgpData package also contains a number of percentile rank tables that display how a student’s performance has changed over time. These are especially helpful for teachers and families in determining the level of progress needed by a student to reach an achievement target, such as proficiency.

We want to make sure that our members have access to the data they need. To this end, we have upgraded our website to be compatible with mobile devices. This includes a new responsive design and the ability to load pages much more quickly than before. This means that users of our website can now view the results of their sgp predictions on their phones no matter where they are. We have also added a mobile-friendly version of our FAQ page so that users can find the answers to their questions on the go. We hope you enjoy the new features and continue to provide your feedback!