Workshop Description

As a leading organization in the field of educational research for nearly 60 years, IEA promotes capacity building and knowledge sharing to facilitate innovation and foster quality in education. IEA’s manifold empirical studies inspire fruitful dialogue on critical educational issues, informing the development of evidence-based policies and practices across the globe.

Only within the past decade, IEA conducted nine international large-scale assessments (ILSA), each with up to 59 participating countries, studying various topics and target populations. IEA studies approach educational reality in all its complexity, collecting not only achievement data but also a wide range of information about the contexts within which teaching and learning occurs. In the context of mathematics, two IEA studies are of special interest. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) investigates mathematics and science achievement of fourth and eighth grade students, and considers achievement within the context of the in- and outside school environment of students. This study has been conducted every four years since 1995. Secondly, the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), conducted in 2008, examined how future teachers around the world are prepared to teach mathematics in primary and lower secondary schools. The key research questions focused on the relationships between teacher education policies, institutional practices, and future teacher’s mathematics and pedagogy knowledge at the end of their pre-service education. The study gathered information on various characteristics of teacher education institutions, programs, and curricula; the opportunities to learn within these contexts; and future teacher’s knowledge and beliefs about mathematics and learning mathematics.

All data arising from IEA studies are publicly available and extensively documented; they provide a valuable and rich source for in-depth analysis in many fields of educational research, including the didactics of mathematics. However, due to their complexity, thorough methodological skills are needed to analyse and interpret this data correctly which increases the threshold for researches to actually make use of it.

The primary objective of the workshop was to show how IEA study data can be used for research aiming at improving the teaching of mathematics. In the first part of the workshop, the structure of IEA data was introduced and then the access paths to data sources, technical documentation, analysis guides, and software tools were shown to participants. Sources and contacts available for support when working with IEA data were mentioned as well. In the second part, the possible uses of data for researchers who focus on the didactics of mathematics were discussed. The methodological challenges and limitations of ILSA data were explained along with solutions about how to address them for data analysis and interpretation, for example, by disclosing appropriate statistical analysis methods. Participants had the chance to study questionnaire and achievement test materials and to develop ideas for suitable research questions that can be answered through the use of TIMSS and TEDS-M databases.