Students' attitudes toward statistics: implications for the future

College Student Journal, Sept, 2004 by Jamie D. Mills

In previous studies, many variables related to student attitudes such as previous mathematics grades, self-concept, prior computer experience, grade point average, previous statistics experience, level of statistics course (introductory vs. advanced), anxiety, and gender have been investigated. Results have shown that attitudes are related to math experience (Brown & Brown, 1995), level of statistics course (Waters, Martelli, Zakrajsek, & Popovich, 1989), previous statistics experience (Sutarso, 1992), and grade point average (Ware & Chastain, 1989). In addition, research regarding anxiety has indicated a negative relationship; that is, the higher a student's anxiety level, the lower the student's performance (Benson, 1989; Ware & Chastain, 1989). Many other researchers have explored whether gender differences are related to student attitudes or cognitive performance, with somewhat mixed results (Elmore & Vasu, 1986; Faghihi & Rakow, 1995; Fullerton & Umphrey, 2001; Roberts & Saxe, 1982; Sutarso, 1992; Ware & Chastain, 1989; Waters et al., 1989; Woehlke & Leitner, 1980). Finally, innovative teaching and learning strategies have also been used to improve student attitudes, such as utilizing technology in the classroom or using hands-on constructivist-type activities. Results for these studies have shown no changes in student attitudes toward statistics (Brandsma, 2000; High, 1998) to some changes in certain aspects of statistics (Kennedy & McCallister, 2001).

Purpose

Over the past few years, there has been a concerted effort to improve the teaching and learning of statistics. The matriculation of the computer and other uses of technology in the statistics classroom as well as new and innovative teaching strategies continue to offer teachers (and students) with many teaching (and learning) alternatives. Students enrolled in an introductory undergraduate statistics course that emphasized concepts and incorporating technology (i.e., data analysis, CSMs) were administered the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS). This survey was used to simply describe student attitudes toward statistics as well as to provide additional research regarding important variables related to student attitudes.

Method

The SATS uses a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 4 = neither disagree nor agree, 7 = strongly agree) that contains 4 subscales: 1) Affect, 2) Cognitive Competence, 3) Value, and 4) Difficulty. Higher scores indicate more positive attitudes toward statistics. Items such as 'I like statistics', 'I am under stress during statistics class', 'Statistics is worthless', and 'Most people have to learn a new way of thinking to do statistics' are example attitudinal statements from each subscale, respectively (the SATS is appended). The SATS survey was chosen because the subscales on the survey represent important attitudes that are related to student achievement (Elmore, Lewis, & Bay, 1993; Schau et al., 1993). Also, this survey has been used in previous research and its reliability and validity indices have been empirically documented and are reported below.