Are those who love mathematics more successful? A meta-analytical owerview of TIMSS data

There is a widespread belief that a person who loves a job will be successful. Mathematics achievement has been the subject of many studies. The number of studies on this subject is also increasing. In this study, it is aimed to make a general evaluation by examining the mathematics achievements of students who like and dislike mathematics using TIMSS data. In the literature, there are many studies examining the relationship between liking mathematics and achievement. Most of such, studies are contucted with relativel small sample sizes. Therefore, there is no meta-analysis study focusing on the relationship between liking mathematics and mathematics achievement using TIMSS data. In this context, a meta-analysis, which is a quantitative method, was contucted using data from countries that participated in the TIMSS 2011-2019 assessments. Students' mathematics achievement tests and student questionnaires were used as data. In the meta-analysis, the average scores of students who liked and disliked mathematics from mathematics achievement test were used. Then, effect size, heterogeneity, and significance values were obtained from these values using the R package analysis program. IDB Analyzer program was used to merge the data and SPSS and MS Office Excel 2019 program was used for coding. Since population parameters differ from country to country, these values were analyzed according to the random effects model. At the end of the study, when the overall effect size of the three interventions was examined, it was concluded that students who liked mathematics were about 45 points ahead in mathematics achievement compared to those who did not like mathematics. In addition, it was observed that those who liked mathematics at the 8th-grade level were ahead in terms of achievement compared to those who liked mathematics at the 4th-grade level. No significant difference was found in the analysis by gender. A comparison between countries revealed that liking mathematics is a either not important or very important in terms of achievement. Furthermore, when the results of Turkey are analyzed, it is seen that the difference in mathematics achievement between those who like mathematics and those who do not like mathematics decreased towards 2019. KEYWORDS: Like Mathematics, Mathematics Achicvement, TIMSS, Meta-analysis