Latent Profile Patterns of Affective Attitudes in Math and Science and Their Influential Factors for Elementary and Middle School Students in TIMSS 2019

According to the results of the international academic achievement assessment and previous studies, it is continuously reported that Korean students have high cognitive achievement but very low affective achievement. The purpose of this study is to explore the characteristics of the affective attitudes in math and science and to provide the implications for the improvement of students’ affective attitudes. To this end, multilevel latent profile analysis based on the 3-step method was used. We explored the latent profiles of the affective attitudes in math and science and their influential factors. We used data from 3,886 elementary school students(151 schools) and 3,857 middle school students(168 schools) who participated in TIMSS 2019. The results are as follows. First, for 4th graders, five latent profiles such as ‘negative(3.7%)’, ‘moderate(61.3%)’, ‘math positive(9.8%)’, ‘science positive(17.4%)’, and ‘very positive(7.8%)’ groups were derived. On the other hand, for 8th graders, the negative characteristics of each subject appeared(math negative(5.5.%), science negative(6.2%), moderate(72.2%), positive(11.3%), very positive(4.3%)). Second, in both grades, it was found that ‘sense of school belonging’, ‘instructional clarity’, and ‘solving math problems on your own’ were more related to the positive groups rather than the other groups. Third, for 4th graders, regional scale had an effect on the group classification. Lastly, educational implications for improving the affective attitude in math and science were proposed.