A solid understanding of inferential statistics is of major importance for designing and interpreting empirical results in any scientific discipline. However, students are prone to many misconceptions regarding this topic. This article structurally summarizes and describes these misconceptions by presenting a systematic review of publications that provide empirical evidence of them. This group of publications was found to be dispersed over a wide range of specialized journals and proceedings, and the methodology used in the empirical studies was very diverse. Three research needs rise from this review: (1) further empirical studies that identify the sources and possible solutions for misconceptions in order to complement the abundant theoretical and statistical discussion about them; (2) new insights into effective research designs and methodologies to perform this type of research; and (3) structured and systematic summaries of findings like the one presented here, concerning misconceptions in other areas of statistics, that might be of interest both for educational researchers and teachers of statistics.

This study uses the Attitudes Toward Statistics (ATS) scale (Wise 1985) to investigate the attitudes toward statistics and the relationship of those attitudes with short-and long-term statistics exam results for university students taking statistics courses in a five year Educational Sciences curriculum. Compared to the findings from previous studies, the results indicate that the sample of undergraduate students have relatively negative attitudes toward the use of statistics in their field of study but relatively positive attitudes toward the course of statistics in which they are enrolled. Similar to other studies, we find a relationship between the attitudes toward the course and the results on the first year statistics exam. Additionally, we investigate the relationship between the attitudes and the long-term exam results. A positive relationship is found between students' attitudes toward the use of statistics in their field of study and the dissertation grade. This relationship does not differ systematically from the one between the first year statistics exam results and the dissertation grade in the fifth year. Thus, the affective and cognitive measures at the beginning of the curriculum are equally predictive for long-term exam results. Finally, this study reveals that the relationship between attitudes toward statistics and exam results is content-specific: We do not find a relationship between attitudes and general exam results, only between attitudes and results on statistics exams.

Both researchers and teachers of statistics have made considerable efforts during the last decades to re-conceptualize statistics courses in accordance with the general reform movement in mathematics education. However, students still hold misconceptions about statistical inference even after following a reformed course. The study presented in this paper addresses the need to further investigate misconceptions about hypothesis tests by (1) documenting which misconceptions are the most common among university students of introductory courses of statistics, and (2) concentrating on an aspect of research about misconceptions that has not yet received much attention thus far, namely the confidence that students have in their misconceptions. Data from 144 college students were collected by means of a questionnaire addressing the most common misconceptions found in the literature about the definitions of hypothesis test, p-value, and significance level. In this questionnaire, students were asked to select a level of confidence in their responses (from 0 to 10) for each item. A considerable number of participants seemed to hold misconceptions and lower levels of concept-specific self-perceived efficacy were found to be related to misconceptions more than to the correct answers. On average, students selected significantly lower levels of confidence for the question addressing the definition of the significance level than for the other two items. Suggestions for further research and practice that emerge from this study are proposed.

Although a number of instruments for assessing attitudes toward statistics have been developed, several questions with regard to the structure and item functioning remain unresolved. In this study, the structure of the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS-36), a widely used questionnaire to measure six aspects of students’ attitudes toward statistics, is investigated. This study addresses the previously unexplored issue of individual item functioning. Based on confirmatory factor analysis using individual items, the results suggest that the SATS-36 can be improved by removing some poorly functioning items and that depending on the goals of a specific study either six subscales could be used or three of them (Affect, Cognitive Competence, and Difficulty) can be combined into one subscale without losing much information. First published May 2011 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives

Despite the relevance of correlational studies for most research domains, many students, teachers, and researchers alike hold misconceptions concerning the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. One of these, the transitivity misconception, has not yet been documented in a systematic way. This paper summarizes the first empirical study, using 279 university students, and examines the relationship between student-based and task-based factors and the appearance of this misconception. In particular, two task-based factors seemed to have a significant effect on its appearance. In addition, the respondents’ level of confidence in their answer to the transitivity item was significantly lower than for most other times. First published November 2009 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives