The purpose of this tutorial is to provide a Stata introduction for education data analysts who are not yet comfortable using Stata, and to demonstrate useful data exploration commands. You don't need to know any Stata to do this tutorial. In Part 1, you will see how to use data exploration commands to inspect a student-level dataset. In Part 2, you'll get practice using data exploration commands to answer simple research questions.
You will need to have Stata version 12 or higher installed on your computer to run this tutorial. Download, unzip, and extract the files. Open the .smcl file, and arrange the viewer and main Stata windows side by side so that you can see them both. Work through the tutorial by clicking on commands in the viewer window or typing them into the Stata command window.
This tutorial was originally authored by the Strategic Data Project.
OpenSDP is an online, public repository of analytic code, tools, and training intended to foster collaboration among education analysts and researchers in order to accelerate the improvement of our school systems. The community is hosted by the Strategic Data Project, an initiative of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. We welcome contributions and feedback.