The interaction between new curricular goals for students and alternative methods of assessing student learning is described. Suggestions are offered for teachers of statistics who wish to re-examine their classroom assessment practices in light of these changes. Examples are offered of some innovative assessment approaches that have been used in introductory statistics courses, and current challenges to statistics educators are described.
This study investigated the effect of attitudes toward mathematics-related coursework, previous mathematics coursework, student sex, spatial ability, and masculinity-femininity of interest pattern on statistics achievement. Subjects were 188 students from the inferential statistics classes taught at a midwestern university during 1977-1978. Instruments administered were five spatial visualization ability subtests of the Factor-Referenced Cognitive Tests, Fennema-Sherman Mathematics Attitudes Scales, the Masculinity-Femininity scale of the MMPI, the Attitudes Toward Feminist Issues Scale, and a biographical data sheet. Sex-related differences were found on two of the mathematics attitude scales, on three of the five spatial visualization subtests, and on the total points achieved in the statistics course. Regression analyses were performed to determine the predictors of success in statistics courses.
This study illuminates some interesting parallels between statistics anxiety and mathematics anxiety in social science students. Parallel to what is confirmed for mathematics anxiety, two factors were observed to underly statistics anxiety scores, namely, statistics test anxiety and content anxiety. The study revealed modest though significant correlations between student attributes and the two confirmed dimensions of statistics anxiety. Furthermore, parallel to the inverse correlation reported for mathematics anxiety and math course performance, statistics anxiety correlated negatively with high school matriculation scores in math as well as self perceptions of math abilities. These data lend support to the hypothesis that aversive prior experiences with mathematics, prior poor achievement in math, and a low sense of math self-efficacy are meaningful antecedent correlates of statistics anxiety and thus lend some credence to the "deficit" interpretation of statistics anxiety.
The two subscales of the Attitude Toward Statistics scale (Wise, 1985), Attitude Toward the Field and Attitude Toward Course, were administered on the first and last day of class, and the Statistics Attitude Survey (Roberst and Bilderback, 1980) on the last day of class to 302 students in ten sections of an undergraduate introductory statistics course. The scales were reliable measures of students' attitudes toward statistics, were essentially unrelated to sex of respondent and year in college, and on last class administration correlated with course grade. The two subscales of the Attitude Toward Statistics scale were highly correlated with the Statistics Attitude Survey.
The purpose of the present short report is to investigate the correlates of statistics anxiety. The sample consisted of 151 first- and second-year-level female students in the department of educational sciences enrolled in statistics-related courses. The findings indicated that a priori anxiety of statistics was not reduced by acquaintance with the subject, nor was students' willingness to further study of statistics affected by this experience. Furthermore, grades in statistics were neither related to statistics anxiety nor to willingness to pursue further study of statistics. Inductive reasoning ability was significantly related to statistics anxiety but not to mathematics anxiety.
The present investigation compared two statistics attitude scales, the Statistics Attitude Survey (SAS) by Roberts and Bilderback (1980) and the Attitudes Toward Statistics (ATS) by Wise (1985). It was concluded that the ATS was essentially an alternate form of the previously developed SAS.
A 34 item scale entitled Statistics Attitude Survey (SAS) was developed and administered to three samples of students taking a beginning statistics course. Analyses showed that the scale was highly homogenous and that total scale scores had moderate correlations with statistics grades.
This study describes the development and validation of a new instrument entitled Attitudes Toward Statistics (ATS) to be used in the measurement of attitude change in introductory statistics students.
The Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS) was designed for use in both research and instruction. A panel of instructors and introductory statistics students identified by consensus four facets of attitudes toward statistics: (a) Affect--positive and negative feelings concerning statistics; (b) Cognitive Competence--attitudes about intellectual knowledge and skills when applied to statistics; (c) Value--attitudes about the usefulness, relevance, and worth of statistics; and (d) Difficulty--attitudes about the difficulty of statistics as a subject. This structure was validated for a sample of undergraduate students using confirmatory factor analysis. Additional validity evidence was obtained through the correlation of SATS with Wise's Attitudes Toward Statistics scale, which showed significant, positive relationships between the two instruments.
An important theme in an introductory statistics course is the connection between statistics and the outside world. This article describes some assignments that have been useful in getting students to learn how to gather and process information presented in the newspaper articles and scientific reports they read. We discuss two related assignments. For the first kind of assignment, students work through prepared instructional packets. Each packet contains a newspaper article that reports on a scientific study or statistical analysis, the original report on which the article was based, a worksheet with guidelines for summarizing the reported study, and a series of questions. In the second kind of assignment, each student is required to find a newspaper article themselves, track down the original report, summarize the study using our guidelines, and write a critique of the article. Here, we describe the guidelines we developed to help the student in reading the newspaper article and orginal source, and the procedures we used for each type of assignment. Examples of handouts and assignments appear as appendixes.