Conducting Assessments and Surveys with Shiny

By Jason Bryer

This post describes a framework for using Shiny for conducting, grading, and providing feedback for assessments. This framework supports any multiple choice format including multiple choice tests or Likert type surveys. A demo is available at jbryer.shinyapps.io/ShinyAssessmentTest or can be run locally as a Github Gist:

runGist('a6fb5a3b1d5fd56cff64')

Key features of this framework include:

• Assessments take over the entire user interface for a distraction free assessment.
• Creating an assessment requires:
  • A vector of item stems.
  • A data frame with item choices.
  • A function that will process the results.
• Button or link to start the assessment.

Example

Let’s walk through the statistics assessment example. The first step is to define the multiple choice items, here defined in a CSV file.

> math.items  names(math.items)
[1] "Item"   "Stem"   "Answer" "A"      "B"      "C"      "D"      "E"     

We will also define a function that will be called when the user completes the assessment. This function needs to have one parameter named results. This parameter is a character vector of the user responses. The values are either NA if there was no response, or the column name of the item.choices defined below (here A through E). In this example, the results will be stored in a reactiveValues object so that the UI will refresh with new results.

assmt.results 

Next, we create an assessment by calling the ShinyAssessment function.

test 

The first three parameters, input, output, and session are simply passed from shinyServer. The other parameters you can set are:

• name The name of the assessment. This should be a name that follows R’s naming rules (i.e. does not start with a number, no spaces, etc).
• callback The function called when the user submits the assessment. Used for saving the results.
• item.stems A …read more

  Source:: r-bloggers.com