The emergence of a reform movement in statistics education has influenced the teaching and learning of statistics over the past few decades. The teaching of statistics concepts and courses in elementary and secondary education as well as the implementation of technology into the statistics classroom are important changes involved in this movement. Considering the changes in instruction and learning over the past few years, the purpose of this paper was to describe the attitudes of students enrolled in a reformed course. Although previous research has suggested that student attitudes toward statistics have been negative, the overall results suggested that students in introductory statistics courses today have more positive attitudes toward statistics than negative. Important variables related to statistics achievement such as mathematics ability, statistics experience, student confidence, and gender continue to influence student attitudes. Implications from the findings of this study might suggest that the collaborative effort from researchers and teachers to improve the teaching and learning of statistics over the past few years reveals optimistic results.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education