Studying the comparability of student perceptions of teaching quality across 38 countries

Student perceptions are rarely used to compare teaching quality across countries due to the challenge of ensuring a comparable construct or achieving exact measurement invariance. The present study aims to evaluate the extent to which student perceptions of teaching quality can be used for valid cross-national comparisons. To this end, the study aims to overcome challenges associated with traditional measurement invariance by applying a novel method – alignment optimization. Based on data from 38 countries from the 2019 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), our results showed limited comparability across countries with variation between behavioral management and instructional clarity scales. We review potential causes of non-comparability using the estimated mean scores. Implications for further research are discussed.