ESUM-CINEG Open-source VBA Excel Macros and Manual
In many, if not most testing programs that employ equating, the new form is equated to at least two previously equated forms, say k of them. In such cases, the final conversion table is typically taken as some weighted average of the k conversions, where each of the k conversions is based on some particular equating method. Typically, the results for multiple methods are examined for each link, a particular method is chosen for each link, and then the final conversion table is some weighted average of the one particular user-selected method for each link. ESUM-CINEG (Equating SUMmary) is intended to facilitate these tasks.
ESUM-CINEG is a set of Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros. The user can think of ESUM-CINEG as a computer program that “sits on top” of Excel, which means that after ESUM-CINEG is run, all the features and capabilities of Excel are available to the user to manipulate, compute, or plot any of the ESUM-CINEG results.
ESUM-CINEG does not perform the equating for any particular method; computer programs available on the CASMA website (www.education.uiowa.edu/casma) can be used to do so. (See, in particular, Equating Recipes by Brennan, Wang, Kim, & Seol, 2009, which is on the CASMA website.) Rather, ESUM-CINEG displays numerical and graphical results that can help a user select a method for each link and ultimately choose the final conversion for the new form.
ESUM-CINEG takes as input the conversion tables and related information for each of the equating methods employed with each of the k links. The output for ESUM-CINEG is of two types: (a) equating results and plots for each link (one worksheet per link); and (b) equating conversion tables and related plots for the “new” form based on a weighted average (weights chosen by user) of the equating conversion tables for the user-selected method for each link. The user can obtain equating summaries for as many different sets of methods (one per link) and weights (one per link) as desired.
