Is It Possible to Compare Teacher Beliefs Across Countries? Achieving Approximate Measurement Invariance Through Bayesian Elastic Constraints

• In Event: Red Tape: Worldwide Impediments Toward Successful Education

Abstract

Using data from IEA’s Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), the measurement equivalence of teachers’ beliefs across countries is investigated for the case of ‘mathematics-as-a fixed-ability’. Measurement equivalence is a crucial topic in all international large-scale assessments (ILSA) and widely undervalued for non-achievement measures. Although it is well known that cultural differences may affect response styles or meaning of constructs and although comparability is often not specifically examined, ILSA results are compared across countries in terms of scale means. Full scalar invariance is typically unattainable in in ILSA due to their sheer size and local item dependencies. To deal with both challenges, a Bayesian approach is introduced that uses informative priors to define elastic equivalence constraints to investigate the comparability of TEDS-M future teachers’ beliefs under the assumption of approximate measurement invariance. Substantively, a clear pattern of 3 groups of countries emerged that corroborates preliminary findings in other studies for other teacher beliefs. Future mathematics teachers in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines believed more strongly that mathematics is a fixed ability, whereas the USA, Chile, Norway, Germany, and Switzerland believed less strongly in this. Taiwan, Singapore, Poland, and Russia took the middle ground.

Author

• Sigrid Blömeke, University of Oslo