Dissimilarities in Attitudes between Students in Service and Mainstream Courses towards Statistics: An Analysis Conducted in a Developing Country

Abstract

In this study, we firstly investigate the attitudinal differences towards statistics between students (from a developing country) in service module and mainstream courses; and, secondly, differences in their attitudes over time, at the beginning and at the end of these courses. Knowledge regarding descriptive and inferential statistics are required for students at tertiary level in many disciplines, and the literature confirms (especially in developing countries) the under-preparedness (at all year levels), inadequate performance and low motivation of students in such courses. An international acknowledged instrument (SATS-36) revealed students' (from different faculties) initial attitudes towards statistics on six components (affect, cognitive competence, value, difficulty, interest and effort) and statistical significant differences between pre-and post-test data. The main implication from these findings are that students (in all faculties) tend to decrease in attitudinal scores over time, and educators can take awareness of this when designing pedagogy in statistics modules.

Fostering mathematical modelling competency of South African engineering students: which influence does the teaching design have?

“…In this study, we decided to adapt SATS-36 towards mathematical modelling (denoted by SATMM) and thus to construct corresponding items to determine students' attitudes towards mathematical modelling. An additional reason for this decision was that SATS-36 has already been used locally by the first author (see van Appel & Durandt, 2018). The SATMM consists of 36 questions (19 items reverse coded) and responses were measured on a 7-point rating scale where higher scores show a more positive attitude (1 = strongly disagree, 4 = neither disagree nor agree, 7 = strongly agree).…”

“…However, omitting this item from the scale would have only marginally increased the value of McDonald's Omega. For this reason, content considerations, and because lower levels of internal consistency were also measured for the difficulty dimension in other studies (van Appel & Durandt, 2018;Vanhoof et al, 2011), the item was retained. In subsequent studies, the scale is to be checked again on a larger sample (see Section 7).…”

Investigation of the Statistical Anxiety Rating Scale Psychometric Properties with a Sample of Greek Students

“…Statistics anxiety and attitudes toward statistics have statistically significant negative relationships (Baloglu Kocak & Zelhart., 2007;Chew & Dillon, 2015;Finney & Schraw, 2003;Perepiczka Channdler & Becerra, 2011). Student attitudes toward statistics tend to be negative, especially in social and behavioral sciences (Mills, 2004;Sarikaya et al, 2018;van Appel & Durandt, 2018;Vanhoof et al, 2011). Due to their negative attitude, students often experience a statistics course as an intimidating component that inhibits effective conceptual learning, resulting in high levels of statistics anxiety (Baloglu et al, 2007;Onwuegbuzie & Wilson, 2003;Vanhoof et al, 2011).…”

Educación Estadística: tendencias para su enseñanza y aprendizaje en educación secundaria y terciaria

“…Dentro de los principales resultados de estas investigaciones destaca el hecho de que el nivel de actitud del estudiantado decrece con el tiempo en cuanto a la presencia de comportamientos diferenciales de los ítems en variables como edad y disciplina académica, la confirmación de marcos conceptuales, la correlación de las actitudes con otros constructos, como la autoeficacia o la ansiedad, y, ante todo, el papel relevante que juegan las actitudes en el aprendizaje de la Estadística (de Oliveira et al, 2018;Nielsen y Kreiner, 2018;Rodríguez y Gil, 2019;van Appel y Durandt, 2018).…”