Teachers who are satisfied with their profession are more motivated, may be more likely to continue teaching into the future, and may experience greater overall well-being. The TIMSS 2019 Teachers’ Job Satisfaction scale, based on teachers’ responses to five statements about how they feel about being a teacher, is described in Exhibit 9.21 (see About the Scale). Exhibits 9.22, 9.23, 9.24, and 9.25 present teachers’ reports of their job satisfaction, including the percentage and average achievement of students with teachers who reported they were “very satisfied,” “somewhat satisfied,” and “less than satisfied,” and the average scale score on the Teachers’ Job Satisfaction scale, for each country. Countries are ordered by the percent “very satisfied.”

Across the TIMSS 2019 countries, almost all students in fourth and eighth grades were taught mathematics and science by teachers who were “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with being a teacher, with job satisfaction somewhat higher among fourth grade teachers than eighth grade teachers. In fourth grade, 61 percent of students were taught mathematics and science by teachers who reported they were “very satisfied,” and 34 percent were taught by teachers who reported they were “somewhat satisfied.” Only 5 percent of students had mathematics or science teachers who reported they were “less than satisfied.” In eighth grade, 54 percent of students had mathematics teachers and 53 percent of students had science teachers who said they were “very satisfied,” 39 percent of students had mathematics and science teachers who said they were “somewhat satisfied,” and 7 and 8 percent of students had mathematics and science teachers, respectively, who reported they were “less than satisfied.”

In fourth grade, average achievement was somewhat higher for students of “very satisfied” teachers compared with “somewhat satisfied” teachers (503 vs. 499 in mathematics and 493 vs. 490 in science). Counterintuitively, in both subjects, average achievement was highest for students with “less than satisfied” teachers (515 for mathematics and 508 for science), though there were few students in this category, and in some countries, there were so few that average achievement could not be estimated. In the eighth grade, average achievement was also higher for students with “very satisfied” compared with “somewhat satisfied” teachers (493 vs. 486 for mathematics and 494 vs. 486 for science). In both subjects, for the few students with “less than satisfied” teachers, average achievement was close to that of students with “somewhat satisfied” teachers (490 in mathematics and 488 in science).