Data sgp is a database that contains many different types of information and allows families to see how their students are performing on state tests. It also provides a number of useful statistics for educators such as student growth percentiles. These percentiles show how a student’s performance on an exam compares to that of other students in the same grade. This is seen as a more meaningful measure of progress than simply looking at an unadjusted score or comparing a current score to a previous one.
Students are measured on a variety of state and federal assessments in the United States. These scores are used to determine a students academic status in various subjects such as math, science and english literature. These results are then compared to other students across the state and country to identify trends over time. This is known as growth modeling and can be an effective tool for teacher evaluations. It is important to note that the accuracy of these growth models depends on the quality of the data inputs. The data sgp database has been designed to provide reliable and accurate growth model results.
The purpose of the data sgp project is to assemble a well-vetted dataset that can be subjected to multivariate statistical analyses that can control for geological and methodological biases. Phase 1 of this effort focused on the Neoproterozoic and Paleozoic. Future phases will capture a wider range of geologic time, data types and geography.
As the demand for these types of data continues to increase, a major focus of the project will be to improve the availability and quality of these data. While this will require substantial investments, it is the only way to ensure that these data are available in a form that can be used to support educational research and policy.
A major goal of the project has been to develop a set of tools and functions for analyzing these datasets. These are currently being deployed in several schools around the state as part of their teacher evaluation systems. It is our hope that these tools will be available to a larger group of teachers for use in their classrooms in the future.
We have created an extensive tutorial section for the site that covers all aspects of using this data. This includes a step-by-step guide on how to download and extract the data, as well as instructions for running some of the higher level functions that are built into the data sgp package.
These higher level functions, such as studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections, can be run on WIDE or LONG formatted data. The latter is recommended for operational analyses as it is simpler to manage than the WIDE data set and all of the higher level functions, such as studentGrowthPercentiles, are designed around this data format.
Another key thing to understand is that the percentiles calculated by data sgp are based on the distribution of the student population in each grade level. As such, the percentiles will not always be a bell-shaped curve. In fact, there will likely be a large amount of variance between the actual percentiles and the expected distribution (this is known as “noise”).