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A growing body of recent research suggests that in wealthier and more gender-egalitarian countries, gender differences in attitudes to, graduation rates in, and occupational preferences for disciplines related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are larger. These findings contradict the gender stratification hypothesis, i.e., that enhancing gender equality reduces the gender gaps disadvantaging girls. This study examines the educational-gender-equality paradox concerning motivation for learning mathematics using country-level panel data analysis. The analysis expands the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study’s twenty-year cognitive trend scale by including the Second International Mathematics Study. We apply a market-basket approach with item response theory modeling to construct comparable motivation scales of the student questionnaires that account for both cultural and longitudinal differences. Our results suggest that the economic development of a country is associated with the country-level gender gap in intrinsic motivation, potentially influencing pupils with a lower parental education background more.

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been assessing students' attitudes every fourth year since 1995. The trend scaling of these constructs started in 2011, fueling interest in exploring how different education systems perform regarding affective outcomes of education. This study explored the feasibility of establishing long-term motivational scales extended with the Second International Mathematics Study administered between 1976 and 1982. We investigated whether cross-cultural comparability holds and how different methodological approaches influence the long-term scaling of motivation towards mathematics. We used grade eight data from five educational systems that have participated in every time point up to 2015. We followed three alternatives: an item response theory-, a confirmatory factor analysis-, and a market-basket approach. Our results show that the three methods provide similar trends at the country level and high correlations at the student level. We discuss methodological implications in the context of international large-scale assessments.

International comparative assessments of student achievement are constructed to assess country-level differences and change over time. A coherent understanding of the international trends in educational outcomes is strongly needed as suggested by numerous previous studies. Investigating these trends requires long-term analysis, as substantial changes on the system level are rarely observed regarding student outcomes in short periods (i.e., between adjacent international assessment cycles). The present study aims to link recent and older studies conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) onto a common scale to study long-term trends within and across countries. It explores the comparability of the achievement tests of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and previous IEA studies on mathematics in grade eight. Employing item response theory, we perform a concurrent calibration of item parameters to link the eight studies onto a common scale spanning the period from 1964 to 2015 using data from England, Israel, Japan, and the USA.