R&D Hub

Paul Bailey and Blue Webb, members of the EdSurvey team, recently published an article, “Expanding NAEP and TIMSS Analysis to Include Additional Variables or a New Scoring Model Using the R Package Dire.” Featured in the journal Psych in its special issue on computational psychometrics, this article showcases the new Dire software and its utility for ushering in a new era of data use at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The NAEP R&D Program stayed busy in 2022, making strides on a wide variety of fronts. As the year comes to a close, let’s look back at some of the progress and achievements made in 2022.

EdSurvey 3.0 is now available on CRAN-R. This latest update provides education researchers with the ability to tap into three new powerful functions that utilize cutting-edge techniques to leverage complex statistical analysis of large-scale assessment data.

NAEP researchers Paul Bailey and Ting Zhang and NCES Acting Branch Chief of Reporting and Dissemination Emmanuel Sikali presented a one-day course on Analyzing NAEP and TIMSS Data with Direct Estimation Using the R Packages EdSurvey and Dire at the 2022 IMPS Conference in Bologna, Italy.

Using new data from large-scale assessments such as NAEP and TIMSS is difficult because simply merging the data and using the well-known plausible value and survey methodology will yield biased results. To help researchers with this problem, the EdSurvey product development team recently published a new version of Dire, an R package intended to complement its primary statistical software application.