| NEWS | R Documentation |
We observe that the function used to define the best estimate of the score index for an examinee about 10 to 15 percent of the time has large nearly flat intervals of low values. Moreover, it is often the case that there are multiple minimizing locations, and function thetafun does not always identify the lowest of these. New function thetasearch uses a fast grid search to identify the lowest point, and replaces the location identified by thetafun where required by the integer closest to the global minimum. This is usually done after the cycles are completed as a final step.
The test analyst no longer needs to construct a "grbg"" object in order handle missing of illegitimate responses by treating them as an additional option, the garbage option as we call it. This is now done automatically within function make.dataList. Function make.dataList no longer needs an argument "grbg"." In order to makethis work, the user does need to adhere to a discipline. For each item, the labels or indices of its options must be the first positive integers. For the quantitative SweSAT test, for example, 68 of the items have option indices 1,...,4, and 12 have indices 1,...,5. For this large test given to over 55,000 examinees, the garbage option is essential for all items. It is assigned within make.dataList to an option with the index one larger than required for the legitimate options, so that after make_dataList has done its work, the 68 items have indices 1,...,5 and the others indices 1,...,6. Any integer within the data matrix U that exceeds the highest legitimate index is re-assigned to the corresponding garbage index. Do be aware that this process can change the U matrix that you set up initially. Users often want to have non-integer labels for options. This is still available by setting these up in the "optList" list vector, and these will appear in the most of the plots.
This version of TestGardener also has various code improvements that speed up computation and improve the information in plots.
Plots using the score index as the abscissa now use arc length along along the test information curve as the abscissa, since this interval is invariant under warpings of the index and therefore on a ratio scale. The codes in the demo and vignette folders have been modified accordingly.