Measurement of job motivation in TEDS-M: testing for invariance across countries and cultures

Abstract

The paper presents the challenges of cross-country and cross-cultural research on the motivation to become a mathematics teacher based on data from the “Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M)”. Referring to studies from cross-cultural psychology, measurement invariance (MI) of constructs representing different motivations to become a teacher was examined in confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across the countries that participated in TEDS-M. The data supported metric invariance which means that comparing relationships between motivation and other constructs across countries is permitted, with the exception of extrinsic motivation in Taiwan. Scalar invariance was not supported by the data across countries but across cultures: Scale means can be compared between Germany, Switzerland and (with regard to intrinsic motivation) Norway and Poland as well as between Singapore and Taiwan (with regard to the intrinsic motivation) and Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand (again regarding intrinsic motivation).