The data sgp package is designed to help users create and analyze student growth projections. Whether you’re a developer or an end user, there are several things you should know about this package before you use it for your analysis.
1. How to Create an SGP Data Set
In general, there are two common formats for representing time dependent (student assessment) data: WIDE and LONG. In WIDE format, each case/row represents a unique student and columns represent variables associated with the student at different times.
With LONG format, time dependent data is spread out across multiple rows in the data set. This allows for more complex calculations and analyses when compared to WIDE format. The SGP package includes exemplar WIDE and LONG data sets that will assist you in setting up your own data.
2. How to Conduct SGP Analyses
The SGP package contains functions for conducting lower level SGP analyses, such as studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections. However, it is often easier to run operational SGP analyses using higher level (wrapper) functions.
3. How to Prepare Your Data
Once you have the data in a format that can be used with SGP, it is important to prepare it for use by the SGP package. This means creating a data structure and using the appropriate file names.
One of the most important steps is defining the unique student identifier. This can be done with a number of different methods.
Typically, the simplest approach is to simply create a column that uniquely identifies each student. This can be accomplished by creating a column called ID and putting the first digit of the student’s birthdate in that column.
4. How to Find Students in Your DataSET
The next step is to identify the students who will be used in your SGP analysis. The easiest way to do this is by using a tool like CSVEdit.
5. How to Organize Your Dataset
The final step in the process is to organize your data in a way that makes it easy to find students by their identifier. This can be done with the sgpData function or by using your favorite tool like Excel.
6. How to Create an Individual Student Growth Plot
Lastly, you must create an individual student growth plot. The SGP package provides a function called summarizeSGP that can be used to generate these types of graphs.
To do this, you will need to define a variable called SCALE_SCORE that can be used to indicate how many assessments were taken by the student in each year of the data set. The SCALE_SCORE value can be a positive or negative number and will depend on the level of the student.
The result of this calculation will be a score that is based on the percentage of students in the class who scored at a higher or lower level than the student. This can be a useful information for teachers and parents to determine whether or not a child is achieving.