The data sgp site is part of the US DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) testbed in the Southern Great Plains. Here, ARM scientists collect instrument and model data in order to study atmospheric air currents, cloud processes and improve large-eddy simulation (LES) models used to predict climate change.
This data set from ARM Southern Great Plains Observatory, the world’s largest atmospheric measurement site, includes both observational and modeling data from this massive atmospheric measurement site. Data sgp contains instrument observations collected at this location including weather station data, cloud and radiation measurements and atmospheric spectral measurements available to the general public. Furthermore, Data sgp contains results of its own LASSO activity developed to offer modeling capabilities alongside instrument data.
Students achieving scores of 3 or higher on MCAS tests qualify for Student Growth Percentiles (SGP). Student SGPs measure performance against academic peers across the state in their same grade and compare it with individual’s progress relative to these peers in order to place students within one of three categories: Developing, Approaching or Meets/Exceeds.
For the sgpdata package, there is the option of formatting data either WIDE or LONG format. Lower level functions like studentGrowthPercentiles and studentGrowthProjections work best with WIDE data sets while higher-level wrapper functions (and the sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_LOOKUP table) need LONG data formats instead. When performing operational analyses using long formatted data sets it offers numerous preparation and storage advantages over smaller WIDE data sets.
The sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_LOOKUP tables provide an anonymized list of teachers associated with each test record for a student in a content area and year, regardless of whether that teacher taught more than one course in that content area/year. Each teacher is listed once for every student they taught regardless of how often. These tables are organized alphabetically by instructor number – their unique identifier within sgpdata data set.
NJDOE connects district course roster submission data to relevant student growth data for each teacher, and uses that information to calculate each teacher’s minimum SGP score, which will then be tabulated alongside their practice and SGO scores in its teacher evaluation system.
To determine each teacher’s mean Student Growth Percentiles (mSGPs), the New Jersey Department of Education uses an algorithm which takes into account both student growth percentages from all classes in which the teacher instructs as well as teacher practice and SGO scores for that teacher. Finally, their mSGPs are converted to 1-4 scores before being added up with these other figures and tabulated alongside these other scores.
The sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_LOOKUP_TABLES tables offer an easy way to retrieve teacher-instructor association information for every test record within the sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_LOOKUP_DATA set. Each row in this data set contains one column for each content area with teacher number in one column followed by names of instructors who taught that content area and year; these tables can only be accessed by districts who have permission from stakeholders to share this data set with them.