The purpose of the study is to investigate how well the mathematics achievement is explained by the students and school related factors. Also, to what extent students and school related factors components are accounted for students&rsquo / mathematics achievement in answering reasoning level questions and basic mathematical knowledge questions will be investigated. This study will basically combine students&rsquo / questionnaires items with their mathematics achievement scores obtained from mathematics achievement tests items. According to content and cognitive domains three achievement tests were prepared from TIMSS-2003 released mathematic items. Student questionnaire consist of combination of items from TIMSS-2003 and TMSS-1999 student questionnaires. The seventy six items selected from the students questionnaires were analyzed using principle component factor analysis and ten interpretable dimensions were found. Based on the result of the factor analysis, variables were generated by selecting the observed variables with highest loadings. These variables were: socioeconomic status, perception of success, teacher centered activities, students centered activities, out of school activities, out of school activities II, school climate, reason for being successful in mathematics, homework and computer. The data which is used in the study gathered from four socially and economically different schools in Ankara and the final sample of the study consisted of 426 elementary school students. This data was analyzed by using regression analysis. Regression analysis results indicated that socio-economic status was the strongest factor explaining mathematics achievement. Other important variables were the perception of success, use of computers and homework activities. Socioeconomic status and perception of success have positive relationships with mathematics achievement, while homework and computer have negative relationships. These four variables account for the 30.1 % of the variance in mathematics achievement. Other variables did not significantly contribute to mathematics achievement in the regression model. Students&rsquo / achievement in basic mathematical knowledge was explained by the same variables which were socioeconomic status, perception of success, homework and computer in the same way. However, achievement in reasoning level explained by socio- economic status, perception of success and homework. The use of computer factor did not contribute the achievement in reasoning level.

The main objective of this thesis was to explore issues related to student achievement motivation in the Swedish TIMSS 2003 (Trend in International Mathematics and Science Study) context. The thesis comprises of five empirical papers and a summary. The expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation was used as the general theoretical framework in all empirical papers, and all papers are concerned with construct validation in one form or another. Aspects of student achievement motivation were measured on a task-specific level (motivation to do well on the TIMSS test) and on a domain-specific level (self-concept in and valuing of mathematics and science) and regressed on test performance. The first paper reports the development and validation of scores from an instrument measuring aspects related to student test-taking motivation. It was shown that a number of items in the instrument could be interpreted as a measure of test-taking motivation, and that the test-taking motivation construct was distinct from other related constructs. The second paper related the Swedish students’ ratings of mathematics test-taking motivation to mathematics performance in TIMSS 2003. The students in the sample on average reported that they were well motivated to do their best on the TIMSS mathematics test and their ratings of test-taking motivation were positively but rather weakly related to achievement. In the third and the fourth papers, the internal structure and relation to performance of the mathematics and science self-concept and task value scales used in TIMSS internationally was investigated for the Swedish TIMSS 2003 sample. For mathematics, it was shown that the internationally derived scales were suitable also for the Swedish sample. It was further shown that ratings of self-concept were rather strongly related to mathematics achievement while ratings of mathematics value were basically unrelated to mathematics achievement. For the science subjects, the internal structure of the scales was less simple, and ratings of self-concept and valuing of science were not very strongly related to science achievement. The study presented in the fifth paper used interviews and an open-ended questionnaire item to further investigate student test-taking motivation and perceptions of the TIMSS test. The results mainly corroborated the results from study II. In the introductory part of the thesis, the empirical studies are summarized, contextualized, and discussed. The discussion relates obtained results to theoretical assumptions, applied implications, and to issues of validity in the TIMSS context.