The low-stakes character of international large-scale educational assessments implies that a participating student might at times provide unrelated answers as if s/he was not even reading the items and choosing a response option randomly throughout. Depending on the severity of this invalid response behavior, interpretations of the assessment…

Questionnaire scales that are mixed-worded, i.e. include both positively and negatively worded items, often suffer from issues like low reliability and more complex latent structures than intended. Part of the problem might be that some responders fail to respond consistently to the mixed-worded items. We investigated the prevalence and impact of…

Communication of International Large-Scale Assessment (ILSA) results is dominated by reporting average country achievement scores that conceal individual differences between pupils, schools, and items. Educational research primarily focuses on examining differences between pupils and schools, while differences between items are overlooked. Using a…

A general validity and survey quality concern with student questionnaires under low-stakes assessment conditions is that some responders will not genuinely engage with the questionnaire, often with more random response patterns as a result. Using a mixture IRT approach and a meta-analytic lens across 22 educational systems participating in TIMSS…

Background: Fair comparisons of educational systems in large-scale assessments can be made only if the differences in curricula have little impact on the outcomes. This study investigated the sensitivity of science achievement rankings to varying degrees of curriculum implementation in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study…

This study investigates consistent and inconsistent respondents to mixed-worded questionnaire scales in large-scale assessments. Mixed-worded scales contain both positively and negatively worded items and are universally applied in different survey and content areas. Due to the changing wording, these scales require a more careful reading and…

The implementation of mathematical competencies in school curricula requires assessment instruments to be aligned with this new view on mathematical mastery. However, there are concerns over whether existing assessments capture the wide variety of cognitive skills and abilities that constitute mathematical competence. The current study applied an…

This study offers curriculum developers, teachers, and science education researchers a fine-grained profile on strengths and weaknesses in specific science domains and topics. The study involved a representative sample of 3844 Norwegian pupils in grade 8. Their responses on 216 TIMSS items in 18 topics from 4 science domains were modelled in a…

Using data from the international Teacher Education and Development Study: Learning to Teach 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 and…