Abstract
International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) provide invaluable information for researchers and policy makers. Analysis of their data, however, requires methods that go beyond the usual analysis techniques assuming simple random sampling. Several software packages that serve this purpose are available. One such is the R Analyzer for Large-Scale Assessments (RALSA), a newly developed R package. The package can work with data from a large number of ILSAs. It was designed for user experience and is suitable for analysts who lack technical expertise and/or familiarity with the R programming language and statistical software. This paper presents the technical aspects of RALSA—the overall design and structure of the package, its internal organization, and the structure of the analysis and data preparation functions. The use of the data.table package for memory efficiency, speed, and embedded computations is explained through examples. The central aspect of the paper is the utilization of code reuse practices to the achieve consistency, efficiency, and safety of the computations performed by the analysis functions of the package. The comprehensive output system to produce multi-sheet MS Excel workbooks is presented and its workflow explained. The paper also explains how the graphical user interface is constructed and how it is linked to the data preparation and analysis functions available in the package.
Highlights
Academic Editor: This article is an open access articleThe international Large-Scale Assessments and Surveys (ILSAs) are becoming increasingly important for research and policy-making in education
The package was built for user experience and brings a number of features that help even the analysts without technical skills to analyze ILSA data
The article presented the technical aspects of R Analyzer for Large-Scale Assessments (RALSA) and its design
Summary
The international Large-Scale Assessments and Surveys (ILSAs) are becoming increasingly important for research and policy-making in education. Different from other R packages, RALSA brings a comprehensive output system, which exports the results into an MS Excel workbook with multiple sheets grouping different kinds of estimates together by type with cell formatting (for more details, see Section 3.4) This feature is of great help for the analyst, who can use the output tables directly in a publication; The IEA IDB Analyzer is very convenient to use and has all of the features listed above. It provides simplified code snippets to demonstrate the basic concepts used in building the package’s functionality
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