Literature Index

The difficulties that many students, particularly those in the social and behavioral sciences, encounter while taking an introductory statistics course have been widely reported in many parts of the world. Factors that have been purported as relating to performance in introductory statistics include a variety of cognitive and affective variables (Feinberg &amp; Halperin, 1978). Cognitive factors, such as mathematics ability and background, certainly play a major role in performance in an introductory statistics course; however, affective variables are also important. Gal and Ginsburg (1994) reported that "The body of research on students' attitudes, beliefs, and affect related directly to statistics education is very small and problematic." They further state that concerns for studying non-cognitive aspects of statistics education should not only be motivated by outcome (performance) but also by process considerations.<br><br>A major issue concerns the influence of attitudes on achievement. McLeod (1992) suggested that neither attitude nor achievement is dependent on the other, but they "interact with each other in complex and unpredictable ways. (p. 582)" The prospect of the reciprocal relationship of attitude and achievement has been proposed by others (Kulm, 1980) and negates the possibility of isolating the cognitive and affective domains. A number of studies have investigated the relationship between attitudes toward statistics and performance in an introductory course using a variety of correlational and regression techniques. Results generally indicate a small to moderate positive relationship. This relationship appears to be fairly consistent regardless of the instrument used, the time of administration of either the attitude or performance measure, or the level of the student.<br><br>Longitudinal studies of math attitudes and performance (Pajares &amp; Miller, 1994; Meece, Wigfield, &amp; Eccles, 1990; Eccles &amp; Jacobs, 1986) have provided path analyses of the relationship of these variables. In a study of undergraduates, Pajares and Miller (1994) determined that mathematics self-efficacy was highly related to mathematics performance with mathematics self-concept and high school mathematics experience making a small, but significant contribution. Perceived usefulness was not a contributor to mathematics performance. Eccles and Jacobs' (1986) path analysis indicated that mathematics grades were influenced by the students' self-concept of math ability and math anxiety, but were not influenced by the student's perception of the task difficulty or the perceived value of mathematics. Meece, Wigfield, and Eccles' (1990) path analysis found that students' prior grades and expectancies were predictors of grades, while importance and anxiety were not. In several other papers, the first two of the current authors have developed a model suggesting that some aspects of statistics attitude at the beginning of a course affect test performance during the course and that end of course attitudes were both directly and indirectly influenced by performance during the course. The research reported here extends that line of inquiry looking at data from English and Arabic speaking samples available in the U.S. and Israel.

Previous replication studies have met with discrepant results in their attempts to evaluate Piaget and Inhelder's study of chance and probability concepts in children. Consequently, 56 subjects (aged 5-4 to 17-11) were tested on 2 cognitive tasks taken from the authors' original work. Specific objections to Piaget and Inhelder's experimental and analytic procedures are overcome here by utilizing a scoring procedure which elicits item-type data from relatively standardized interviews. The results of this replication study indicate considerable agreement with Piaget and Inhelder's description of stage-related verbal features while failing to confirm their description of stage-related nonverbal features. Evidence from this study is related to the concept of "stage" in cognitive-developmental theory, and the procedures used here are evaluated vis-`a-vis developmental issues.

Focuses on ability of students of fourth grade in structuring error and experimental variation as distribution. Interpretation of centers of distribution by students; Performance of students in various reasoning assignments.

Studies have yielded highly mixed results as to differences in male and female student performance in statistics courses; the role that professors play in these differences is even less clear. In this paper, we consider the impact of professor and student gender on student performance in an introductory business statistics course taught by economics faculty. Using a sample of 535 students, we find, after controlling for academic and mathematical background, that students taught by a professor of the opposite gender fare significantly worse than students taught by a professor of the same gender. The presence of this gender effect highlights the importance of pursuing sound, gender-neutral pedagogical practices in introductory statistics education.