Current instruments for assessing university students’ statistics anxiety prevailingly emphasize the affective construct component. In order to unfold the construct in a more exhaustive and differentiated manner, a scale for measuring university students’ worry, avoidance, and emotionality cognitions was developed. In two samples of education science majors the present pilot study aimed at analyzing the scale’s psychometric properties and at gaining preliminary validation results. Principal component analyses led to the formation of a unidimensional scale which appeared to be sufficiently reliable. Its relations to domain-specific self-belief and background variables turned out as theoretically expected – thus, for the time being the scale should claim criterion validity.

Based on a cognitive-motivational modeling of construct relations, the present study aimed at analyzing the role of prior statistics experiences to ex­­plain education science students’ statistics anxiety. Data were analyzed from two independent samples which consisted of N = 113 and N = 87 participants – using a different operationalization of the experience variable in each case. In both samples, analyses demonstrated students’ statistics anxiety to be substantially ex­plained by their self-concept and negative utility value – but not by their prior sta­tistics ex­periences. However, conceptually assumed interaction effects between motivation and ex­perience variables did not occur. Instead, students’ statistics anxiety appeared to be de­pendent on self-concept and value scores across all experience levels. Moreover, different operationa­lizations of the experience variable produced somewhat varying effect patterns. Find­ings are discussed in terms of conceptual, methodological, and instructional implications.

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