Data sgp is an open source software package used for conducting student growth percentile (SGP) analyses with R programming language and is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux operating systems. The package also provides access to tools for longitudinal SGP data analysis.

SGP (Student Growth Profile) is a measure of student progress based on comparisons to academic peers in a given grade and assessment subject who have had statistically similar assessment score paths. The SGP model compares each student’s scores against those of his or her academic peers before calculating how much the student has grown relative to these academic peers – thus providing an indication of progress made towards meeting state standards in a classroom environment.

Student growth scores range from 1-99 and represent how much their assessed scores have improved relative to academic peers. The higher the number is, the greater is their growth.

Students are ranked according to their mSGP scores from the previous school year and converted into percentile ranks on a scale. An mSGP score of 85 indicates more growth than 85% of their academic peers; teachers can use mSGP data to gauge how well students are performing in classroom environments and make informed instructional decisions for next year’s class sessions.

The sgpdata package provides four sample data sets designed for use with SGP analyses. sgpData specifies data in WIDE format used by lower level SGP functions studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections; the remaining three data sets offer different forms of information relevant to such analyses.

SGPdata_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER is used by SchoolView and RLI to represent teacher-level aggregates, while it also exports an anonymized student-instructor lookup table for use with SGP functions such as abcSGP, prepareSGP, and analyzeSGP.

Southern Great Plains Observatory serves as the primary field measurement site for Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, collecting atmospheric measurements across 9,000 square miles in Oklahoma and Kansas. Scientists use these measurements to study cloud and aerosol processes that lead to improvements in Earth climate models. Part of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Data Center, its output can be freely found via Data Discovery.

As with all research, the SGP Observatory relies on access to high quality data. To this end, scientists at the observatory have created and continue to maintain the SGP Database by volunteering their time and expertise; additionally, via the sgpData package researchers from other institutions can access and use SGP data in their own research; this type of collaboration forms part of wider efforts supporting data transparency and reproducibility within education. As time progresses the database will grow while SGPdata remains committed to making it as accessible as possible to users.