W01: Research On Statistics Attitudes


Marjorie Bond (Monmouth College) and Alana Unfried (Cal State Monterey Bay)


Schedule

Monday, May 15 at 1 p.m. to Thursday, May 18 at noon

Abstract

This three-day workshop will continue the work started at a workshop in July 2016, which had as its main purpose to develop a strategic plan to answer the four research priorities set forth in the 2012 report title Connecting Research to Practice in a Culture of Assessment for Introductory College-level Statistics, Section 2, Affective Constructs (Pearl, et al., 2012).

These four research properties are:

  1. How can affective constructs be accurately measured?
  2. How do affective constructs contribute to success in learning statistics, in either the short or long term?
  3. How do these affective constructs contribute to long-term engagement with statistics (e.g. statistically literate citizenship)?
  4. What are the important affective constructs to measure about teachers, and how do these influence teaching practice and ultimately impact student outcomes?

The term affective includes the broad areas of attitude, beliefs, emotions, motivation, etc.

Researchers are building on the work of previous instruments measuring affective constructs in students and instructors to create at least two new instruments which are aligned with educational psychology theory such as Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT). During this workshop, research collected since the July 2016 workshop will be presented and discussed which will lead us to the potential items to measure the affective constructs. Plans will be made for evaluation of our items over the summer so that we have two pilot instruments ready for testing during the academic year 2017 – 2018. Additionally, we will need to create a plan for the data collection of the pilot instruments.

Anyone who is interested in statistics attitude research is invited to attend the workshop whether they were at the July 2016 workshop or not; however, participants are expected to prepare for the workshop and to continue working on the project after the workshop. New researchers to the area, two-year community college instructors, graduate and undergraduate students are encouraged to join us.

Participants with limited funding can apply for funds to pay for hotel costs during the workshop. Contact Marjorie Bond (mebond@monmouthcollege.edu) for more information. Funding for this project has been provided by a membership initiative grant from the American Statistical Association.


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