Using R to analyze international large-scale educational assessment data

Currently, researchers use mostly commercial software to analyze educational data. Researchers who do not have access to these commercial software can not easily replicate results others have reported in publications. Consequently, computational findings often do not cumulate reliably to offer valid guidelines for educational policy making. This paper demonstrates how to use the free, open-source R computing environment (R Core Team, 2015) to manage and analyze international large-scale educational assessment data. The example is comprised of mathematics achievement and covariates for 15-yearold students from 15 countries, including Taiwan (PISA 2012). In particular, the "intsvy" package developed by Caro and Biecek (2014) is applied to manage the data and the "maptools" package (Bivand & Lewin-Koh, 2015) is used to link numerical summaries to geographical boundaries of countries examined in the illustration. R code to perform analysis of data from PISA detailed in the paper is provided to facilitate reproducibility.