The Rwinsteps package facilitates communication between R and the Rasch modeling software Winsteps. The package currently includes functions for reading and writing command files, sending them to Winsteps, reading and writing data according to command file specifications, reading output into R, and plotting various results.
| Package: | Rwinsteps |
| Version: | 1.0-1 |
| Date: | 2012-1-30 |
| Depends: | R (>= 2.12.0) |
| LazyLoad: | yes |
| License: | GPL (>= 2) |
| URL: | http://www.r-project.org |
| Built: | R 2.13.0; ; 2011-08-30 21:02:07 UTC; windows |
Index:
ifile Item and Person Summary Files plot.ifile Plotting Item Staistics wdat Winsteps Data File rirf Item Functions wcmd Winsteps Command File winsteps Running Winsteps
Rasch modeling in Winsteps begins with a command file, which specifies the structure and contents of the data file and which includes options for customizing how the model is run and fit and for requesting output tables and files. A command file may be construced in R using the wcmd function, read in to R using read.wcmd, or simply referenced in the winsteps function, in which case it is still read into R but invisibly.
The winsteps function returns two of the more relevant output files, the ifile and pfile, for further manipulation and analysis in R. These can also be saved to file and they are read into R using the functions read.ifile and read.pfile, which are simple wrappers to the function read.csv. In this case, files should be saved as csv, and the default file headers should always be included.
Rwinsteps includes additional functions for obtaining the response, information, and error functions at both the test and item levels for the dichotomous Rasch model, and for plotting and comparing results. Finally, the read.wdat and write.wdat functions read and write fixed width formatted data by extracting required information from a command file.
Winsteps is commercial software, available at www.winsteps.com