Diagnosing Teacher Knowledge by Applying Multidimensional Item Response Theory and Multiple-Group Models

Researchers are still struggling to define a concept of pedagogical content knowledge that separates this dimension from content knowledge. Based on data from TEDS-M, an IEA study of mathematics teacher education in 16 countries, this paper aims to contribute to this discourse by using different multidimensional approaches to modeling teacher knowledge. Another question of cross-cultural research is whether the characteristics of the latent traits examined and their interplay are homogeneous across countries (measurement invariance) or if it is necessary to treat the countries as separate groups. Our basic hypothesis is that more sophisticated multidimensional and multiple-group IRT models lead to valuable additional information that gives diagnostic insight into the composition of teacher knowledge. This is demonstrated using the TEDS-M data.

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