Conferences are coming up; this year, the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) and American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meetings are taking place in Chicago on April 12–15 and 13–16, respectively. The NAEP Research and Development team has been busy working on presentations and trainings for these conferences, and we’re excited to offer an opportunity to dive deeper into the EdSurvey and Dire R packages at NCME on Wednesday, March 28, with “Tools For Analyzing NAEP and TIMSS Data in R Using Latent Regression.” This session will be presented by Dr. Emmanuel Sikali, Acting Branch Chief for Reporting and Dissemination at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and NAEP researchers from the American Institutes for Research (AIR).

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.