Student Performance

High School Graduation Rates and Status

NJ SMART is excited to announce the calculation of the New Jersey 4 Year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate.  LEAs can view their 4 Year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate by accessing the High School Graduation Cohort Status Profile Report within the NJ SMART portal.  This profile report will enable LEAs to track individual students’ progress towards graduation in real-time, identify emerging trends across a district based on student-level data, and analyze graduation rates by subgroup.  For more information, please review the documentation posted on the Documents for Download page and the NJ DOE Graduation webpage at http://www.state.nj.us/education/data/grate/.

Student Growth Percentiles (SGP)

Student Growth Percentiles add a new dimension to our understanding of student performance, allowing New Jersey parents, educators, and students to look beyond a point in time status (NJ ASK proficiency) to also understand the change in achievement from one year to the next. By understanding a student’s academic status AND her or his growth, parents, teachers and students have more information to better inform reflection, discussion, and improvement of overall performance.  Please review the following video and documentation for more information on SGP, the blue headings will link you to that particular document.

SGP Video
This video is part of the NJ SMART educational series. This video provides viewers with a better understanding of what a student growth percentile (SGP) is, the concept of academic peers and how it relates to growth percentiles, how an individual SGP is calculated and interpreted, and how SGPs can be reported and interpreted for groups.

SGP – General Overview

This August 2011 white paper from the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessments (NCIEA) provides a 6-page overview of Student Growth Percentiles

SGP – Technical Overview of the Student Growth Percentile Methodology

This technical paper provides a detailed explanation of the statistical methodology used to calculate student growth percentiles

An Illustration of SGP Adoption in the United States

A map illustrating the other states that have adopted, or are on the path towards adopting, this specific model for calculating student growth.

Post –Secondary Student Performance

New Jersey’s public schools, colleges and universities are expected to prepare all students to meet internationally competitive standards of achievement, the escalating demands of the global 21st century workforce, and possess the knowledge and skills needed for a vital democracy.

Currently, many school districts rely upon exit and follow up surveys of their high school graduates in order to capture data related to post-secondary enrollment plans. In other words, most public school districts currently lack a mechanism to capture and analyze the actual post-secondary trends and accomplishments of their high school graduates. Late this fall, NJ SMART will be launching tools that will empower school districts with actual post-secondary enrollment data of their students. This information will be made possible through a data sharing relationship with the National Student Clearinghouse. Districts will be better able to ascertain if their students are truly prepared to compete and persist in college, and understand how many of their 2011 graduates actually enrolled in college this fall, how many students achieve a degree within 4 or 5 years of graduation, etc.

Please revisit this page in the late Fall for additional information on these illuminating tools and resources.