Welcome

Lertap, the Laboratory of Educational Research Test Analysis Package, is a system for item, test, and survey analysis, now well into its fifth version.

This site supports Lertap users by providing access to a variety of resources. You'll find introductory material, meant to show off what Lertap can do; sample data sets for use with classes; lots of documentation; and access to software for downloading.

Can't find what you want on this site? Just send us an email message, and let us know what you're looking for (puedes escribirnos en español, si quieres).

Videos

The quickest way to see what Lertap does might be to take in one of our videos. They're not Hollywood or Bollywood quality (far from it) (far far from it), but they do exemplify what Lertap looks like when it runs. Go for this eye candy by doing you-know-what here.

Recent System Developments

Some new macros are available. One is particularly useful for reformatting the item response charts made by the 'Item responses by groups' option. The default chart made by this option displays a series of response endorsement lines per group. For affective items, such as Likert ones, bar charts may be a preferred display. The new macro makes it easy to change chart type and chart style.

Other macros have to do with creating a list of items incorrectly answered for each student, and producing student performance reports using a Microsoft Word template. More about macros:

http://lertap.curtin.edu.au/HTMLHelp/HTML/index.html?macs_menu.htm

DIF! Differential item functioning -- Lertap for Excel 2007 (and 2010) now has an option, "Ibreaks", which summarizes item responses by groups, making tables and charts in the process. When there are only two groups, and a cognitive test is involved, Ibreaks opens the door to differential item functioning analysis, using Mantel-Haenszel DIF routines. It's possible to get suggested pictures of DIF, charts which plot item p values (proportion correct) by group over all observed score levels. Details are available via this link.

Excel 2010 beta for Windows has been released by Microsoft. It's part of the Office 2010 beta, which may be downloaded from: www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx.

We have a version of Lertap for Excel 2010 under test. Happy to share it if you've downloaded the Office 2010 beta; just write to support@lertap.com. Thus far it does indeed appear that Excel 2010 is faster at rendering Lertap charts (which is most welcome), and much faster at opening and saving large workbooks. It also behaves as expected when Lertap users click on a Help option in a dialog box -- under Excel 2007, such clicks would often simply lead to Excel 2007 Help instead of to 'Lelp', Lertap Help.

There is now a student version for Excel 2007. It's mentioned towards the bottom of the soft where? page. Both student versions now permit up to 44 data records.

Our main Windows machine now runs Windows 7, the new supposed-to-be-better-than-Vista operating system from Microsoft. Looks real good. Comments are here.

Lertap is now equipped to provide handy support for users of ITEMAN, XCALIBRE, and RASCAL. Read more here.

Excel 2008 has been released for the Macintosh line. Unfortunately Microsoft has dropped support for Visual Basic for Applications in this version of Excel, meaning that it will not run Lertap. It seems that VBA is gone from the entire Macintosh Office 2008 suite, unlikely to reappear. Macintosh Lertap users will have to stick with Excel 2004, or with Excel X. Or, they'll start running Windows on their Macs -- maybe that's what Microsoft intended? Correction inserted August, 2009: it is said that VBA will return to the next Mac version of Office. The question is now: when?

Popular Documentation Links

Of course, every resource on our website is popular -- you'd expect no less, no doubt.

However there are two documents which continue to draw the largest crowds, and by far.

One is a paper on "visual item analysis", suggesting supplementing tables of item statistics with eye-catching visuals called "quintile plots" -- click here to link to it, a pdf document about 400 KB in size.

The other is a nearly-exact copy of a 2007 journal article regarding the use of cut scores, as in licensing and certification testing. It's a pdf document, available by clicking here. (This document is fairly technical in nature.)