Motivation towards mathematics from 1980 to 2015: Exploring the feasibility of trend scaling

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.