Validity Study on the Students’ Attitudes Toward Mathematics Scale for English-Speaking Countries

This article focuses on the validity of the students’ attitudes toward mathematics scale based on data from TIMSS 2019. The scale has been reported as having a three-factor structure for decades, but this study assumes the validity can appear differently depending on the country or culture. Thus, the scale should first be checked for invariance between countries. This study selected five English-speaking countries to prevent translation effects. The results of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) indicate that the factor loading values of the two items were below 0.4 in more than four countries. The EFA model with the two items deleted had a greater fit than the others in all countries using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). A metric invariance model based on the EFA results showed the greatest fit when using multiple-group CFA. The findings suggest that two items may need revision, and the results must be interpreted considering differences in students’ cultural backgrounds, even though the questionnaires were administered in the same language, which warrants further research.