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).

Recent System Developments

9 May 2012: A new intro to Lertap 5 is available, a PowerPoint thingie which will (should) open in your browser. This may be the quickest way yet to get an overview of what Lertap 5 can do.

26 January 2012: Click here to read about the new version of Iteman and how it compares to Lertap.

26 November 2011: two popular Lertap interactive help documents are now in epub format as Apple iBooks. Download these beauties and at last realize why it was you bought that iPad or iPhone. The iBook version of Lelp (Lertap help) is available here; the iBook version of the Lertap Sample Data Sets document is here.

4 October 2011: both the Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 versions have been updated with a new routine, "ChartChanger2", which significantly enhances Lertap's ability to display and print quintile plots. Fix yourself up with wall-to-wall plots of item performance graphs. Quickly get an idea of where the weak items are, pictorially. Fun. Useful. See it: click here to read about ChartChanger2, and then here to see how it may be used to make printing quintile charts easier.

Try it: these new Lertaps are known as versions 5.8.2.1 (Excel 2007) and 5.9.2.1 (Excel 2010, both 32- and 64-bit). They may be downloaded from Assessment Systems Corporation. Sample datasets to use for trials are found at this site.

12 June 2011: the Excel 2010 version now works on 64-bit systems (as well as 32-bit systems). This is version 5.9.2.

14 April 2011: a new website is available to showcase some of Lertap's capabilities, to provide datasets which may be downloaded for experimentation, and to update the "Cook's Tour" introduction to Lertap. Follow this link to get to it:

http://lertap.curtin.edu.au/HTMLHelp/Lrtp59HTML/index.html

Version 5.8.0, for use with Excel 2007, has been updated to 5.8.1 and is also available for downloading from ASC. This version works with Excel 2010 too; it has the same features as Version 5.9.1, but its charts have not been optimized for Excel 2010. (If you have Excel 2010, Version 5.9.2 is a better option.)

These latest versions of Lertap have bug fixes, speed enhancements, improved charts (in Version 5.9.2), and an extended set of special macros.

Excel 2010 is faster than Excel 2007; some speed comparisons reported on the internet have even found it to be faster than Excel 2003. Its user interface has numerous subtle but useful changes when compared to Excel 2007. For Lertap users, the speed factor will be most obvious, especially when it comes time to creating charts, such as a set of "quintile plots" for a test -- our own experiments with cognitive tests indicate that Excel 2010 churns out Lertap's quintile plots in about half the time required by Excel 2007. We have also noted big reductions in the time required to produce Lertap's 'IStats' report, the report which includes a full item intercorrelation matrix, eigenvalues, and first principal component loadings.

More special macros are available in all versions of Lertap. 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. This new macro makes it easy to change chart type and chart style. Another new macro introduces a simulated "select-if" capability to Lertap, making it easier to select just some records for analysis (for example, all students in a particular School District).

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

Macintosh users: Excel 2011, released in November 2010, should, in theory, be able to run Lertap 5. However, work on adapting Lertap for this version of Excel has been slowed for a variety of reasons. Please let us know if you might be interested in testing a prototype (when available) by writing to larry@lertap.com.

Videos

To see Lertap being put through a variety of hoops, kick back and take in one of our video "stories". Try 'em: let yourself be dazzled and entertained.

Instructors and Students

Now it's easier to download copies of the free 'Standard' and Student / Demo versions of Lertap. The Standard version is fully featured, but time-limited, with expiry dates designed to coincide with the end of academic semesters in North America. Read more on the soft where? page, or jump directly to the corresponding download site if your own time is limited:

http://www.quia.com/pages/lnelson11/lertap

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.)

Coming in third place is a newer document, another compelling read (naturally), having to do with using Lertap to look for response differences among groups of test takers. For example, users can ask Lertap to create statistics and response charts which will compare item answers, and test scores, by region or gender. Get it, another pdf document, here.