Keywords: psychometrics, educational test, item response theory, shiny, R
Webpages:
https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ShinyItemAnalysis,
https://shiny.cs.cas.cz/ShinyItemAnalysis/ This work introduces
ShinyItemAnalysis (Martinková, Drabinová, Leder, & Houdek, 2017)
R package and an online shiny application for psychometric analysis of educational tests and their items.
ShinyItemAnalysis covers broad range of methods and offers data examples, model equations, parameter estimates, interpretation of results, together with selected
R code, and is thus suitable for teaching psychometric concepts with
R. It is based on examples developed for course of Item Response Theory models for graduate students at University of Washington.
Besides, the application aspires to be a simple tool for analysis of educational tests by allowing the users to upload and analyze their own data and to automatically generate analysis report in
PDF or
HTML. It has been used at workshops for educators developing admission tests and in development of instruments for classroom testing such as concept inventories, see McFarland et al. (2017).
We argue that psychometric analysis should be a routine part of test development in order to gather proofs of reliability and validity of the measurement. With example of admission test to medical school we demonstrate how
ShinyItemAnalysis may provide a simple and free tool to routinely analyze tests and to explain advanced psychometric models to students and those who develop educational tests.
References Martinková, P., Drabinová, A., Leder, O., & Houdek, J. (2017).
ShinyItemAnalysis: Test and item analysis via shiny. Retrieved from
shiny.cs.cas.cz/ShinyItemAnalysis/; https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ShinyItemAnalysis McFarland, J. L., Price, R. M., Wenderoth, M. P., Martinková, P., Cliff, W., Michael, J., & Modell, H. (2017). Development and validation of the Homeostasis Concept Inventory.
CBE-Life Sciences Education.
