The paradoxical relationship between students' non-cognitive factors and mathematics & science achievement using TIMSS 2015 dataset

This study aims to fill in the gap of the accumulating literature on the paradoxical relationship between students' non-cognitive variables and their academic achievement. Previous studies either focus on a single item or didn't check the measurement invariance of the non-cognitive variables. This study first checked the measurement invariance of two important non-cognitive variables including students' confidence and interest using TIMSS 2015 data and found that both scales are metric invariant and thus the comparison of the correlation coefficients across different countries are possible. Correlational analysis indicates that the paradox exists at country level for all countries and at class level only for a few countries.