Winsteps

Rasch started strong in the UK with Bruce Choppin around 1980 - but his reports on the dismal state of British education soon ran into the political reality of "Shoot the messenger!" But times have changed. International competition in all spheres is increasing - and as Tom Peters quotes: "If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less." (General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U. S. Army). So Rasch measurement is taking hold in the UK again. If you are in the UK and want to be put in touch with other Rasch researchers, please contact me directly.

Suggestions for enhancements pour in from Winsteps users. The challenge is to implement them as software, debug them, and then to check that everything else still works. But modern software is so complex that there is no way that all combinations can be checked, so we all become beta-testers, whether we like it or not!

After 20 years, the pressure to include MCQ distracter (or distractor, if you prefer) point-biserial correlations finally became overwhelming, so these are now implemented. They provide indirectly what the "average measures" for the distracters indicate directly: at what ability level the distracter is selected.

For those who want to explore respondent styles, i.e., the way in which they use your rating scale, the new "transposed" output file option swaps the data rows and columns. Now the race is on to find out who can first publish a paper using this feature!

Winsteps 3.59, to be released shortly, will make it easy to convert SAS datasets into Winsteps control and data files. Thank you, SAS, for providing a freeware (with registration on the SAS website) software interface for reading SAS datasets. This conversion will operate the same way as the current SPSS interface. Winsteps has no automatic SAS output capability yet, but Winsteps does output tab-delimited files which can be imported into SAS. The SAS interface to Winsteps uses Windows "Object Linking and Embedding" OLE linking, so be sure that the latest versions of the Windows components Oleaut32.dll and Olepro32.dll are installed in your computer by doing a "Windows update" check.

This does not affect the functionality of other Rasch SAS procs (see www.winsteps.com/rasch.htm) or Kaz Uekawa's SAS shell for Winsteps, www.estat.us/id2.html.

According to "Creating customer evangelists" by McConnell and Huba, companies with delighted customers:

1. Continuously gather customer feedback.
Your emailed questions, comments and criticisms are vital to the development of Winsteps and Facets.

2. Make it a point to share knowledge freely.
The program manuals (accessible online), Rasch publications and emails share all that we know.

3. Expertly build word-of-mouth networks.
Thank you for telling your friends and colleagues about Winsteps and Facets. I appreciate the recommendations.

4. Create community: Encourage communities of customers to meet and share.
We are learning how to do this in the new Internet world ....

5. Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite.
5 copies of freeware Ministep and Minifac are downloaded for every one copy of Winsteps and Facets sold.

6. Create a cause: Focus on making the world, or an industry, better.
Here is our agenda: Linear measures -> Clear thinking -> Scientific advance -> Better world. Perhaps a utopian fantasy .... but 'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all. (Tennyson)

Add yourself to the Winsteps global map showing the location of Winsteps and Facets users and friends. I've taken the liberty of adding Georg Rasch. There's an FAQ at the bottom of the map.