The data sgp package makes Student Growth Percentile (SGP) analyses extremely straightforward. Most time is spent in data preparation rather than calculations themselves, and once that step has been taken successfully the analyses themselves become very straightforward and uncomplicated – most errors that arise while working with SGP data stem from improper preparation issues which are easily fixed.
SGP analyses compare students to their academic peers – those that share similar prior assessment scores (the student’s “academic path”). SGPs can show how far a student has come toward meeting grade level standards even if they haven’t yet attained them, or identify students not making enough progress and in need of additional instruction or intervention.
To conduct SGP analyses, you will require a computer with the open source software R installed. R is free and compatible with various operating systems including Windows, OSX and Linux; moreover there are numerous resources online to assist in getting you started with running analyses using this approach. We strongly suggest taking some time to familiarise yourself with its user manual prior to diving in headfirst into running SGP analyses.
First step of an SGP analysis is preparing data for use with studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections functions of Stata. We have created an exemplar data set called sgptData_LONG that models this format of data used with these analyses as a starting point for your own analyses. It includes variables like:
Data SGP analyses can be made more operational with its selection of high-level functions that aggregate lower level functions into one function call and simplifies source code for an analysis, such as abcSGP and updateSGP.
The southern Great Plains (SGP) atmospheric observatory is an atmospheric research site operated by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility in north central Oklahoma. As one of the world’s premier field measurement facilities devoted to studying cloud and aerosol processes – critical components in understanding our climate system – the SGP covers an area of over 9,000 square miles with 160 individual sites featuring more than 350 in situ and remote sensing instruments, data from which is utilized in various ways from single observation analyses through to multi-observation process studies assimilation into Earth system models.