Development of Interactive Shiny Modules for Psychometric Research Dissemination

Half day short course (2:00pm – 5:30pm)

Short Course #4

Shiny applications are interactive web applications built entirely in R, designed for general data visualization and analysis. They enable dynamic demonstrations of statistical concepts and algorithms, facilitating teaching, learning, and dissemination of methodological research. ShinyItemAnalysis (SIA) is an R package and Shiny application specifically designed for the interactive presentation of psychometric methods and the analysis of multi-item measurements in education, psychology, and related fields (Martinková & Hladká, 2023). The package recently introduced open, extendable functionality through add-on modules that can easily reuse features already implemented in the main SIA application (Martinková, Netík, & Hladká, 2025).

In this workshop, participants will explore the fundamentals of building Shiny applications using a traditional approach and contrast it with the innovative modular framework of SIA, which will be the primary focus for the remainder of the session. We will provide a comprehensive overview of the SIA infrastructure, combining psychometric concepts with practical functionalities such as data uploading and processing. The workshop also includes a hands-on introduction to the SIAtools package, designed to streamline the development of add-on modules. Practical demonstrations will feature sample modules from SIAmodules and other packages, providing participants with actionable insights into designing and deploying their own interactive applications for psychometric research and education.

Intended Audience

Practitioners, researchers, and graduate students, interested in disseminating their research via Shiny modules. Participants are expected to bring their own laptops with R (>= 4.1.0) installed. Some familiarity with R programming is expected.

References

Martinková, P., & Hladká, A. (2023). Computational Aspects of Psychometric Methods: With R. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003054313

Martinková, P., Netík, J., & Hladká, A. (2024). Enhancing Psychometric Analysis with Interactive ShinyItemAnalysis Modules. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.18943

About the instructors

Patrícia Martinková (Czech Academy of Sciences and Charles University)

Patrícia Martinková is an Associate Professor at Charles University and Chair of the Department of Statistical Modelling at the Institute of Computer Science, Czech Academy of Sciences (ICS CAS) in Prague. She heads the Computational Psychometrics Group (COMPS), leads the development of ShinyItemAnalysis, and teaches statistical methods in psychometrics.

Jan Netík (Czech Academy of Sciences and Charles University)

 Jan Netík is a PhD fellow at ICS CAS, a member of the COMPS Group, and a PhD student at Charles University. He is an R developer contributing to ShinyItemAnalysis and the primary maintainer of the companion package SIAtools, which supports the development of modular SIA add-ons. His recent research, funded by the Charles University Grant Agency, focuses on using large language models to predict item difficulty based on item wording.