Session Information
09 SES 02 B, Assessment in Higher Education (Part 2)
Paper Session
Contribution
Statistics is a course that most of the students, regardless of their field, required to take at least once during college and/or graduate studies. Despite its importance, students often have negative attitudes and fear of statistics and they perceive statistics as the worst course taken in college (Bradstreet, 1996). However, students’ feelings, attitudes, expectations and motivations are seen as the potential contributors of their learning in statistics. Research studies have found significant relationships between attitudes toward statistics and achievement (Dempster & McCorry, 2009; Feinberg & Halperin, 1978).
As students’ expressing positive attitudes toward statistics is an important course outcome, a need for assessing statistics attitudes has emerged (Garfield & Chance, 2000). Several instruments were developed to assess students’ attitudes toward statistics since 1980s (Roberts & Bilderback, 1980; Wise, 1985). The most commonly used early instruments included Statistics Attitudes Survey (SAS) and Attitudes Toward Statistics (ATS). Despite their extensive use, these early instruments have been criticized for their content and the factorial structure by many researchers (Schau, 2003; Schau, Stevens, Dauphinee, & Del Vecchio, 1995; Sorge, 2001; Wise, 1985). Schau et al. (1995) suggested that a survey that is to be used in research and instructional situations should have several characteristics; however, none of the existing statistics attitudes surveys has all of these characteristics. Therefore, they developed “Survey of Attitudes toward Statistics©” (SATS©) to have these attributes. The original version of the SATS© consists of 28 items measuring four components of students’ attitudes toward statistics: Affect, Cognitive Competence, Value, and Difficulty. Based on expectancy value theory, Schau added two additional components: Interest and Effort, yielding new SATS-36© containing 36 items (Schau, 2003). SATS-36© has a seven-point response scale (1=strongly disagree, 4= neither disagree nor agree, 7= strongly agree) where higher scores corresponds to positive attitudes.
In this study, we used Survey of Attitudes toward Statistics© (SATS-36©) (Schau, Stevens, Dauphinee, & Del Vecchio, 1995) and investigated the relationship between students previous attitudes toward statistics and students’ post attitudes toward statistics along with their statistics achievement.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bradstreet, T. E. (1996). Teaching Introductory Statistics Courses so That Nonstatisticians Experience Statistical Reasoning. The American Statistician, 50(1), 69-78. Dempster, M., & McCorry, N. K. (2009). The Role of Previous Experience and Attitudes Toward Statistics in Statistics Assessment Outcomes among Undergraduate Psychology Students [Electronic Version]. Journal of Statistics Education, 17. Retrieved September, 10 2009 from www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v17n2/dempster.html. Feinberg, L. B., & Halperin, S. (1978). Affective and Cognitive Correlates of Course Performance in Introductory Statistics. Journal of Experimental Education,, 46(4), 11-18. Garfield, J., & Chance, B. (2000). Assessment in Statistics Education: Issues and Challenges. Mathematical Thinking and Learning 2(1&2), 99–125. Roberts, D. M., & Bilderback, E. W. (1980). Reliability and Validity of a Statistics Attitude Survey. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 40, 3. Schau, C. (2003). Students' Attitudes: The "Other" Important Outcome in Statistics Education. Paper presented at the Joint Statistical Meeting - Section on Statistics Education, San Francisco, CA. Schau, C., Stevens, J., Dauphinee, T. L., & Del Vecchio, A. (1995). The Development and Validation of the Survey of Attitudes toward Statistics. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 55(5), 868-875. Sorge, C. (2001). Impact of Engineering Students' Attitudes on Achivement in Statistics: A Structural Equation Model Analysis. The Univesity of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico Wise, S. L. (1985). The development and validation of a scale measuring attitudes toward statistics. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 45, 101-104.
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