The Role of Previous Experience and Attitudes Toward Statistics in Statistics Assessment Outcomes among Undergraduate Psychology Students


Authors: 
Martin Dempster and Noleen K. McCorry
Volume: 
17(2)
Pages: 
online
Year: 
2009
Publisher: 
Journal of Statistics education
URL: 
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v17n2/dempster.html
Abstract: 

Previous research has demonstrated that students' cognitions about statistics are related to their performance in statistics assessments. The purpose of this research is to examine the nature of the relationships between undergraduate psychology students' previous experiences of maths, statistics and computing; their attitudes toward statistics; and assessment on a statistics course. Of the variables examined, the strongest predictor of assessment outcome was students' attitude about their intellectual knowledge and skills in relation to statistics at the end of the statistics curriculum. This attitude was related to students' perceptions of their maths ability at the beginning of the statistics curriculum. Interventions could be designed to change such attitudes with the aim of improving students' learning of statistics.

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

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