Introducing REQAO, an R Package for those who work with EQAO data files. This package is a collection of functions to assist in the loading of files and the relabeling of values.  As additional functions are added and expanded, the most up-to-date version will be found at https://github.com/cconley/REQAO

What is EQAO?

EQAO (Education Quality and Accountability Office) is an independent agency that develops, administers, analyses and reports on student achievement across Ontario, Canada.  EQAO coordinates the administration of Reading, Writing and Mathematics assessments for students in Grades 3 and 6, Grade 9 Mathematics assessments for students enrolled in Grade 9 Academic and Applied Mathematics courses and an Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) for students in Grade 10 English. EQAO also supports the administration of national and international assessments (TIMSS, PIRLS, PISA, PCAP, ICILS) in Ontario.

Each September, staff in school boards run analyses and produce public reports on the achievement of their students on these assessments.  This package supports the preparation of data for analysis.

This package currently has three functions:

SchoolLoad(grade, year, bident, board, datadir)

What it does: creates a tibble (previously known as a dataframe) of school summary achievement data on EQAO assessments.

Merge all the data files from an EQAO administration year into a single tibble.

Fill in the missing board name and bident (missing in the EQAO files) with the arguments that are passed to the function).

Create a new column with the year of the assessment. This makes it easier to work with multiple years of assessments.

Note: in EQAO files, the year as of June is used as the EQAO naming convention for each school-year.

How it is used:

grade: this is a numeric value that can be 3, 6, 9 or 10. This is used to construct the names of the data files.

year: this is a numeric value in the form YYYY. This is used to construct the names of the data files.

bident: this is the 5-digit number assigned by the Ministry of Education. This is used to construct the names of the data files.

board: this can be any string you choose in the form “ABCDEFG”. This is used to fill in the blank SchoolName value for the board summary row.

datadir: this is your data directory as a strong in the form “C:/directory/subdirectory”. This can be passed as a vector and is used to construct the string identifying the file and location.

Example:

SchoolTibble <- SchoolLoad(3, 2017, 12345, “Random DSB”, “C:/temp/data/”)

StudentLoad(grade, year, bident datadir)

What it does: creates a tibble of student achievement on EQAO assessments

Merge all the data files from an EQAO administration year into a single tibble.

Compile and relabel the IEP variables into a single, new, readable column (IEPcode).

Relabel values of demographic variables to a readable form (i.e. Gender, ELL, Eligibility, Program, FI etc. as applicable).

How it is used:

grade: this is a numeric value that can be 3, 6, 9 or 10. This is used to construct the names of the data files.

year: this is a numeric value in the form YYYY. This is used to construct the names of the data files.

bident: this is the 5-digit number assigned by the Ministry of Education. This is used to construct the names of the data files.

datadir: this is your data directory, as a string, in the form “C:/directory/subdirectory”. This can be passed as a vector and is used to construct the string identifying the file and location.

Example:

NewTbl <- StudentLoad(6, 2017, 12345, “C:/temp/data/”)

AchieveLabel(x, grade, type)

What it does: Modifies tibbles made using the StudentLoad() function:

Relabel values of all achievement variables contained in the assessment file (i.e. ROverallLevel, Prior_G6_MOverallLevel, OSSLTOutcome, etc.) as character labels (i.e. “Level 1”, “Level 3”, “Exempt”) or numeric labels (i.e. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, NA). Note, when values are relabeled as numeric, all non-level values are relabeled as NA

How it is used: Arguments used in the function

x: the name of the tibble that was created using the StudentLoad() function.

grade: this is a numeric value that can be 3, 6, 9 or 10. This is used to identify naming conventions used by each version of the EQAO assessments.

type: this is one of two strings:

“char”: this will change the values to more meaningful, readable labels (i.e. “Level 1”, “Exempt”, “Pending”

“num”: this will change the values to numeric where Levels 0 to 4 are coded as 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 and all other versions of no-data (withheld, pending, absent, exempt etc.) are relabeled as NA. This is equivalent to calculating “Fully Participating”.

Example:

NewStdntTbl <- AchieveLabel(OldStdntTbl, 6, “char”)

 

Installation and use

The REQAO package can be installed using the following function from the devtools package:

devtools::install_github(“cconley/REQAO“)

Once installed, REQAO can be used like any other package:

library(REQAO)