International comparative assessments of student achievement are constructed to assess country-level differences and change over time. A coherent understanding of the international trends in educational outcomes is strongly needed as suggested by numerous previous studies. Investigating these trends requires long-term analysis, as substantial changes on the system level are rarely observed regarding student outcomes in short periods (i.e., between adjacent international assessment cycles). The present study aims to link recent and older studies conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) onto a common scale to study long-term trends within and across countries. It explores the comparability of the achievement tests of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and previous IEA studies on mathematics in grade eight. Employing item response theory, we perform a concurrent calibration of item parameters to link the eight studies onto a common scale spanning the period from 1964 to 2015 using data from England, Israel, Japan, and the USA.

对学生成绩的国际比较评估旨在评估国家/地区之间的差异和随时间的变化。许多先前的研究表明，强烈需要对教育成果的国际趋势具有连贯的理解。研究这些趋势需要长期分析，因为很少会在短期内（即在相邻的国际评估周期之间）观察到学生成绩在系统水平上的实质性变化。本研究旨在将国际教育成就评估协会（IEA）进行的最新研究和较旧研究结合到一个通用规模上，以研究国家内部和国家之间的长期趋势。它探讨了国际数学和科学研究趋势与IEA以前的八年级数学研究的成绩测试的可比性。利用项目响应理论，我们使用来自英国，以色列，日本和美国的数据，对项目参数进行并发校准，以将八项研究链接到1964年至2015年的共同规模上。