By KimberLeigh F. Hadfield
Information
Formative assessment practices are largely missing in large-enrollment undergraduate introductory statistics courses where high-stakes tests lack individualized feedback and account for a large portion of the student's grade. This exacerbates negative attitudes towards statistics and statistics anxiety, frustrating student success. As a result, students experience delays in their academic trajectory, costing time and money. A call was issued for introductory statistics to prioritize research that promotes pathways for student success (Peck, 2019). Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the impact of student attitudes toward statistics using multi-level modeling techniques to investigate attitudes using the SATS-36 instrument (Schau, 2003) in a large undergraduate introductory statistics course that implemented Formative Assessment Cycles (Hadfield, 2023), frequent formative assessments with reassessment opportunities. The results of this study showed 4-5 times the improvement of attitude components in comparison to past studies in the U.S. with SATS, and, for the attitudes that generally decreased over a semester in past literature, this study found students' attitudes decreased by 1-2 times less. Additionally, this study showed that final course grades significantly moderated these attitudes, which points to using FACs as an intervention in introductory statistics to provide successful statistics course experiences.