Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2022-01-13
Introduction
This vignette demonstrates how to use conquestr to document data, report on the quality of data,
clean data, and construct item bundles or derived variables based on several variables.
Document data
conquestr has a built in system file that we will use for this example.
The function getCqItanal will return a list of lists, each list relating to one generalised item from an
‘ACER ConQuest’ itanal output. The list for each item contains the following information: (1) the item
name according to the item label, (2) a table of item category statistics for the item, and (3) the item-
total and item-rest correlations for the item.
Note that you must use matrixout in your ‘ACER ConQuest’ call to itanal to ensure that these
objects are available in the system file from your analysis.
file:///Users/acercloneyd/conquestr/vignettes/data-cleaning-functions-in-conquestr.html Page 1 of 3
Data cleaning function in conquestr 2/5/2023, 11:23 am
Following the item-specific list objects, the last element of the list returned by getCqItanal contains
summary statistics for the full set of items. The summary statistics include raw and latent score
distribution statistics and Cronbach’s coefficient α .
Pre-specifying criteria for conditionally formatting item analysis output is a key step in an automated
workflow. Any number of metrics from the item analysis can be specified for conditional formatting.
Several of these can be passed to conquestr functions as will be illustrated in the following sections.
The function fmtCqItanal will return a formated version of the itanal object that we read in earlier.
Presently this function will apply coloured text to any distractor point biserial correlation that is larger
than 0. The following example shows the output for the fourth item in the current item analysis.
# return a conditionally formatted item category statistics table for the fourth item
myEx1Sys_itanal_f <- fmtCqItanal(myEx1Sys_itanal, ptBisFlag = ptBisFlag,
textColHighlight = "red")
# print table
myEx1Sys_itanal_f[[4]]$table
file:///Users/acercloneyd/conquestr/vignettes/data-cleaning-functions-in-conquestr.html Page 2 of 3
Data cleaning function in conquestr 2/5/2023, 11:23 am
# print summary
myEx1Sys_itanal_f[[length(myEx1Sys_itanal_f)]] # the last object is always the summary
N 1000.00
Mean 8.43
SD 2.42
Variance 5.84
Skew -0.62
Kurtosis -0.12
Alpha 0.65
Conclusion
This short vignette has illustrated how to access and display itanal output from an ‘ACER ConQuest’
analysis using conquestr. Future vignettes will demonstrate basic and advanced plotting and the
production of publication quality item analysis technical reports.
file:///Users/acercloneyd/conquestr/vignettes/data-cleaning-functions-in-conquestr.html Page 3 of 3