The School of Quantitative Research Methods in Education (QRM, https://www.gu.se/en/qrm) is a research school and an emerging network funded by the Swedish Research Council. QRM aims to contribute to rebuilding of the competence of quantitative methodological knowledge in educational research in Sweden and elsewhere. The proposed workshop contributes to this aim by training basic competence in using the statistical environment, R, which is a widely used, open source project. However, using R is still relatively new in educational sciences.
R is an increasingly used statistical environment maintained by an international team of developers. The proposed workshop is intended for analysts and researchers who do not have yet the knowledge and experience using R. Working knowledge of basic statistics is required.
The workshop will begin with a brief overview of the R environment based on Venables, et al. (2014). Then, based on Grolemund (2014), the workshop leader will assist the participants to download R as well as RStudio, a software application that makes R easier to use.
Afterward, basic data management tasks will be demonstrated and practiced, including importing and exporting data. Then basic statistical analyses will be demonstrated and practiced using several R packages, including plotting the data. Exporting outputs will be also practiced. Finally, based on the workshop participants’ interest and pace of work, advanced statistical analyses will be demonstrated and practiced.
The workshop will end with informing the participants about resources to further develop their knowledge in R and commonly used R packages for working with international large-scale assessment (ILSA) data. Participants should bring a laptop. The workshop leaders will hand out the presentation slides beforehand and the R scripts in case of inquiry afterward.
Draft agenda:
- Introduction
- Downloading and installing R and RStudio
- Data management
- Basic statistical analyses
- Creating plots
- Advanced statistical analyses (Optional)
- Summary and further avenues and resourses