Assessing Students’ Understanding of the Measures of Central Tendency and Attitude towards Statistics in Rural Secondary Schools

Abstract

This research was conducted to assess the level of students' understanding of the measures of central tendency and attitude towards statistics. A survey research was conducted on Tenth Graders in nine secondary rural schools in Sabah, Malaysia. A total of 148 students were sampled using stratified random sampling. Statistical Understanding Test of the Measures of Central Tendency and Survey Attitude towards Statistics questionnaire were used as data collection tools. The data was analyzed descriptively and inferentially by using SPSS version 20.0. The results revealed that students' understanding of measures of central tendency was at a moderate level, while their attitude towards statistics was positive. Gender difference was found to be significant in students' understanding of measures of central tendency (p=0.032), but not in their attitude towards statistics. Generally, male students had a higher understanding than the female students. Furthermore, there were no significant relationships between students' understanding of measures of central tendency and attitude towards statistics, except for Effort component (r=-0.299, p<.05). The finding showed that students who willingly put a great effort to learn statistics did not necessarily warrant a good understanding of the measures of central tendency. This study implied that Mathematics educators should remind students that the quality of learning with the appropriate learning technique invested in it would warrant better understanding of the measures of central tendency.

Investigating the Validity and Reliability of Survey Attitude towards Statistics Instrument among Rural Secondary School Students

“…They previously adapted the SATS instrument called Students' Attitude towards Learning Statistics to investigate the change in 237 eleventh graders' attitudes towards statistics and discovered that the students were slightly more positive at the end of the learning of elementary statistics compared to the beginning of the lesson. Similarly, Saidi and Siew (2019) also discovered a positive attitude towards statistics among the 148 Tenth grade science stream students who studied in a rural district of Sabah, Malaysia as overall, as well as in all of the components in SATS-36, except for the Value component. The students were found to react most positively in the Effort component, followed by Cognitive Competence, Interest, Difficulty, Affect, and Value components.This suggested several matters: students were willing to use more effort to learn statistics and believed in their cognitive ability to understand statistics; students also implied that statistics is not a difficult subject and that they had a high interest in it.…”

“…Thus, the assessment on the attitude towards statistics should be carried out more comprehensively among the Malaysian secondary school students, since this factor might attribute to this matter. Previously, Saidi and Siew (2019) found that the rural secondary students' attitude towards the effort in learning statistics had significant influence on their understanding of statistical concepts, particularly in the measures of central tendency.…”

“…Thus, it is apparent that the assessment on the students' attitude towards mathematics was prioritized in comparison to the assessment on the students' attitude towards statistics. While in fact, there were evidences from the past addressed that the secondary school students in Malaysia did not show a good performance related to statistical learning, including the students who studied in the rural area (IEA, 2015;Saidi & Siew, 2019). Thus, the assessment on the attitude towards statistics should be carried out more comprehensively among the Malaysian secondary school students, since this factor might attribute to this matter.…”

“…In addition to that, the reliability and validity of this instrument was tested through the Rasch Measurement Model (Che Musa, Mahmud, & Md Ghani, 2011). Meanwhile, the study of Saidi and Siew (2019) retained most of the original items in the SATS-36 instrument to assess rural secondary school students' attitudes towards statistics, but this study lacked evidence in the instrument's validity analysis. As both studies did not employ a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) as a tool of validation, thus, this encouraged the researchers to conduct a validity assessment on the SATS-36 instrument by using a CFA method based on the sample of rural secondary school students in Sabah.…”

On Methods to Legal Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in the World

“…So, it is determined that a "smart robot" is "a mechanical device that independently perceives the external environment; it recognizes the circumstances in which it works, and it moves independently." At the same time, the law declares the ability of the state to adopt a special legislation regulating the ethical standards for the development of robotics, which developers, manufacturers and users of smart robots must follow [13,17]. Note that South Korean law was the first initiative to develop a strategy for artificial intelligence.…”