What is ReCo?

It Codes Your Text Responses

The Automatic Text Response Coder (ReCo) codes (e.g., scores) your text response data; for example:

“The story is about a girl falling into and wandering through a fantasy world.”

Is this a similar response like another one? Is it a correct response? ReCo can answer those questions by, first, categorizing all responses in your data into response types by their semantics, and then, second, by training the model to assign codes to each response type.


ReCo is specialized in short text responses from assessments such as PISA, but can be employed in other contexts as well. The app’s complete version will allow you to construct your own text corpora from Wikipedia, compute tailored semantic spaces, apply automatic spelling correction, adapt the workflow to your needs by switching to R at any time, export the classifier so that it can be used as a service during assessment, choose other test languages, and much, much more.

Want to Cite or Get Details?

We have got you covered (i.e., open access).

Andersen, N., & Zehner, F. (2021). shinyReCoR: A Shiny Application for Automatically Coding Text Responses Using R. Psych, 3(3), 422–446. doi: 10.3390/psych3030030