Lertap? What's it?

Glad you asked.

People use Lertap after they've asked other people to answer some questions.

The questions, or "items", generally look something like the following examples:

An example of a cognitive question (from Gronlund, 1985, p.181):

A defining characteristic of cognitive items, such as the one above, is that they have a best answer, sometimes referred to as the correct answer, the keyed-correct response, or just the item key. For Q1, the key is B.

An example of an affective question:

This sample affective item, Q2, exemplifies the use of what's called a Likert type of scale.

Does Q2 have a correct answer? Not really. However, if you were a teacher of social studies, and had just taken your class through a study of South America, then you'd likely want everyone to answer 1, strongly agree.

Here's another example of what Lertap would term an affective item:

Lertap specialises in processing items such as the these. Processes? Yes -- you'd use Lertap if you wanted to find out how many people got Q1 right, how many strongly agreed on Q2, or what percentage of student teachers came through with a "Yes" on Q3.

You might want to have Lertap make a test score for a quiz you've given your class, and it could be that you'd also like to have some measure of the reliability of your quiz. If the reliability is less than what's usually desired, you could ask Lertap to give you some information on each of the quiz's items so that you can identify quiz items which may need a bit of fixing.

Quite often a set of affective items will also be referred to as a test, or scale, and, when this is true of your work, you can get Lertap to make a scale score for each person, to estimate the scale's reliability, and to output a report with details on how people responded to each question.

What about open-ended questions (e.g., What's the square root of 64?)? And how about questions which have been pre-scored (for example, When given a list of city names, the student identified 3 capital cities)? Lertap can do? Yes.

For a fairly quick introduction to Lertap, please try these slides: intro to Lertap 5.

There are some videos, too, and two hand-picked documents which will tell / show you why Lertap should play a prominent part in your life.

Links to the videos are found on another page. Try 'em. If you didn't have need to buy an iPhone-like device before, the videos may give you cause, perhaps enough to convince the boss that you're buying a work tool, not a toy. (Buy it from the department's IT budget?)

Links to the two docs (now a bit dated) are here:

If you looked at one of these docs, or one of the videos, you will know that Lertap is based on Microsoft's Excel program. This gives it all sorts of strengths, particularly when it comes to turning numbers into pictures, reports into graphs.

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