NFBC is the industry leader in premium fantasy baseball leagues, meaning leagues that people pay to participate in with a chance of winning prize money. These leagues are designed to be as competitive and fair as possible, and the NFBC takes steps to ensure this by publishing and publicizing final league standings for all teams. This helps to ensure that league data is not tainted by scummy yahoos who draft a team and then abandon their league after the first week of the season.
The data sgp package provides a set of tools to facilitate analysis of student growth percentiles and projections based on the historical star examinee growth trajectories. It also provides a means to easily create district screening windows that align with these projections so that educators can use this information when making instructional decisions.
Generally, SGP analyses take a two step process: preparing the data for analysis and running the calculations. Preparing the data involves creating an exemplar LONG data file, sgpData_LONG and an INSTRUCTOR-STUDENT lookup file, sgpData_INSTRUCTOR_NUMBER that contain the students’ unique ID numbers and their assessment scores from each of the past five years. This preparation is relatively straightforward and requires only the use of the command line. Once the data is prepared, conducting SGP analyses is as simple as calling the lower level functions studentGrowthPercentiles or studentGrowthProjections.
SGP analyzes the growth trajectories of star examinees to determine the probability that they will reach or maintain proficiency in each subject. The results of these analyses are displayed on the student’s profile in Star and can be used by educators to make classroom instructional decisions that will best support or challenge each student.
It is important to remember that students should be assessed on a variety of measures and that SGP should not be used as the sole factor when making educational decisions. However, SGP provides valuable information that should be considered when assessing the progress of students and planning for future instruction.
Although the SGP project is working to assemble a massive amount of data for Earth history research, it still remains very small potatoes in comparison to what could be classified as “big data.” For this reason, we think of our efforts as more like’medium data’. The sgpData vignette provides a detailed discussion on using wide format data in SGP analyses.
