Chapter 1 Install software programs

To undertake this course, you will need to first install R on your computer, followed by installing R Studio. Both R and R Studio are free programs. R is a very powerful program for carrying out statistical analyses. R Studio provides a user-friendly interface for editing and running R programs, and viewing results. Use your internet browser to search for downloads of R and R Studio. There are different versions for Windows and for Mac.

In the rare cases where you cannot install R or R Studio, there is a R Studio Cloud platform where you can set up an account and run programs directly through your browser.

There are many free resources online for learning R and R Studio. If you are not familiar with R and R Studio, please go through some tutorials online to learn the basics of R. In this course, we will use R with an assumption that you are at least familiar with the basic syntax of R and the interface of R Studio.

1.1 Install R packages CTT and TAM

Start R Studio, select menu item Tools, and then Install Packages. Install CTT and TAM packages separately. Note that R commands are case-sensitive. You have to ensure you type capital or lower case letters consistently, as A and a are treated as different letters.

After installing the two packages, you should download the pdf documents for these two packages. In your browser, search for R CTT pdf document and R TAM pdf document. Download these to your computer as we will refer to them frequently.

If you have installed these packages on your computer sometime ago, it is a good idea to re-install them again so we are all using the latest version.