Primary school students' self-concept in mathematics and science: findings from TIMSS 2019

ENA self-concept is an important construct that has been associated not only with academic achievement but with success in life in general. The self-concept can be general and domain specific. It is believed that by the end of Grade 4 students’ understanding about their abilities is close to reality. Besides, by increasing the individuals’ domain specific self-concept, also the achievement increases and vice versa. In this research, the authors explored the influencing factors of 4th graders’ self concept in Mathematics and Science from the IEA’s TIMSS 2019 study. The factors were selected from the students’ and parents’ questionnaires. As the self-concept is typically associated with achievement, the students’ achievement in Mathematics and Science was used as a reference. The purpose for this study was to examine whether achievement has the main influence on students’ self concept in Mathematics and Science and to find out other influencing factors. The research question was as follows: what factors influence the 4th grade students’ self-concept in Mathematics and the students’ self-concept in Science in the IEA’s TIMSS 2019 study? The authors used a correlation and linear regression analysis to process the data from 8 countries around the Baltic Sea: Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian Federation. The findings revealed that students’ liking for the school subject was a more significant factor for students’ self-concept in Mathematics and Science than their achievement. The achievement was only the second most influencing factor. It was discovered that students with higher self-concept understood their teachers better and were bullied less than their peers with lower self-concept in the domain subject. Keywords: student’s self-concept, academic self-concept, achievement, TIMSS.