Profiling and Researching TIMSS by Introducing a Content Lens on Eighth-grade Science (PARTICLES)

Abstract

This doctoral thesis scrutinizes the content dimension of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to explore: “What content-specific profiles can we obtain about the students’ strengths and weaknesses, and teachers’ instruction, by disaggregating the test into its items and responses?” and “Why is the relationship between science achievement and teachers’ content coverage seemingly so weak in TIMSS?” Four papers apply advanced analyses of the students’ and teachers’ response-level data in TIMSS 2011 and 2015. Findings suggest variation in the Norwegian pupils’ achievement across science topics compared with the international averages (Paper 1), and the degree of their teachers’ coverage of the topics in class across grades (Paper 2), which can inform educators’ decision-making. Results from instructional sensitivity analyses in TIMSS 2015 in papers 3 and 4 suggest that a finer-grained analysis is required to pick up on instruction when the assessments are remote from the instruction. The indicators for content coverage require further attention as they might not be optimal for their purpose.