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 half-day course teaches achievement analyses through both plausible values and latent regression approaches using the EdSurvey and Dire R packages. Public-use NAEP and TIMSS data files will be used for demonstration and hands-on practice as participants learn how to perform data processing and manipulation, descriptive statistics, linear regression, latent regression, and plausible values generation. The course focuses on software applications, but the context and theories behind both approaches (plausible values and latent regression) will be explained at the beginning of the workshop, including large-scale assessment psychometric design, sampling methods, and data analysis strategies.

This training is more advanced and represents a step up from our NAEP Data Training, so we highly recommend it to former NAEP Data Training participants. Learn more about the training and register for NCME 2023 here. You can also look into and register for AERA 2023 here. Be on the lookout for future posts in the NAEP R&D Hub for other 2023 conference season news.