Student Growth Percentiles: Concepts and Potentials for Physical Education

More than 20 states in the US have started to use Student Growth Percentiles (SGP) for both assessing and evaluating student learning and teacher effectiveness.  The focus so far, however, has been mainly on academic subjects, such as English, Math, and Science, and the full potential of SGP for physical education has not been recognized. Developed by Betebenner (2008, 2009), SGP belongs to a “student growth” methodology with a focus on how much a student has improved or grown from one year to the next as compared to his or her academic peers, who had similar starting scores or performances. SGP thus is a relative measure, which focuses on the rate of change in comparison to a student’s academic peers. The rate of the change is expressed using “percentiles” that can range from 1 to 99. Lower numbers indicate lower growth/change when comparing with the peers and higher numbers show higher growth. The scores in the middle represent moderate growth. As a result, every student has an opportunity to demonstrate high or low growth or improvement. Thus, SGP can be conceptually considered as a local change norm. Since pre- and post-test scores in SGP are compared to corresponding absolute criterion and differences between pre- and post-test scores are evaluated based on a norm, SGP can also be considered a “mixed” evaluation approach which takes the advances of Norm- and Criterion-referenced assessments, and pre- and post-test change. With these unique features, SGP could address the key interest of educators and parents: How much has a student/child learned since her/his starting point last year (Yan, 2007)? Additionally, SGP has been used as one of the “Value-Added” methods to determine teacher effectiveness. SGP may have a great potential for assessment and evaluation practice in PE. For example, SGP could help answer parent and stakeholders’ key questions :  Did my child make an actual year’s worth of progress this year? Is my child’s aerobic fitness as muscular strength increasing equally? How close are my students to becoming “Proficient?” Are our students progressing  appropriately toward meeting state/national standards?  SGP, however, is not without its challenges. A large data base with two or more data points per student is needed and the method may get technically complex. Key concepts of SGP, as well as related issues, challenges, future research and application directions will be described in this introduction and overview.