The Importance of Attitudes in Statistics Education

Abstract

People forget what they do not use. But attitudes “stick.” Our article emphasizes the importance of students’ attitudes toward statistics. We examine 15 surveys that purport to assess these attitudes and then describe the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics, a commonly used attitude survey. We present our conceptual model of Students’ Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS-M), which is congruent with Eccles and colleagues’ Expectancy-Value Theory (Eccles’ EVT), as well as others. The SATS-M includes three broad constructs that impact Statistics Course Outcomes: Student Characteristics, Previous Achievement-Related Experiences, and Statistics Attitudes. We briefly describe Eccles’ EVT and other theories that support our SATS-M. We relate findings from research using the SATS to our model and end with implications for statistics education. First published November 2012 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives

Attitudes toward Statistics and Statistical Literacy of Public Senior High School Students

“…Eccles et al (1983) agree that attitudes are made up of many dimensions; that is, attitudes consist of distinct constructs. Ramirez et al (2012) concluded a congruence between affect and EVM affective reactions and enjoyment value, cognitive competence and EVM abilities, self-concept and expectancies, value and EVM attainment and utility value, difficulty and EVM task demands perception, interest, and EVM interest value, and effort and EVM relative cost. Sorge and Schau (2002) demonstrated the usefulness of implementing this model to understand statistics success by demonstrating indirect pathways from difficulty to affect, and therefore achievement, through cognitive competence (Hood et al, 2012).…”

“…In the aforementioned problem, the role of attitudes in the light of statistics courses was acknowledged (Leong, 2006). Attitudes toward statistics comprised students' affect, cognitive competence, value, difficulty, interest, and effort (Ramirez et al, 2012).…”

Challenges Associated With Measuring Attitudes Using the Sats Family of Instruments

“…The conceptual model underlying the SATS instruments, the SATS-M, is based primarily on Eccles's EVT and has been described as an application of EVT to statistics education (Schau, 2003a(Schau, , 2003cSorge & Schau, 2002). The most recent SATS-M also draws from self-determination theory, self-efficacy theory, and achievement goal theory (Ramirez et al, 2012). While there are compatibilities between EVT and the attitudinal components measured by the SATS instruments (Schau, 2003c), EVT did not guide the development of the SATS scales (Xu & Schau, 2019).…”

“…As previously noted, the theoretical framework was not an a priori guide for the development of the SATS-28 instrument: the four-factor structure was proposed by the participants in the NGT process (Schau et al, 1995). A posteriori alignment of SATS instruments with EVT through the SATS-M framework results in important oversimplifications of Eccles's EVT (Ramirez et al, 2012). For example, the EVT model conceptualizes Value as having four components: Interest, Attainment, and Utility Value, and Cost (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002).…”

“…Reflecting these differences, refer to the theoretical framework for the SATS instruments as "Schau's … expectancy-value model" (p. 107). Although the SATS-M has been used to describe relationships among statistics attitudes and statistics achievement (Ramirez et al, 2012), the alignment challenges preclude the use of the SATS instruments for measuring attitudes consistent with more widely known and researched educational theories such as Eccles's EVT. These alignment challenges complicate the interpretations of the SATS scale scores: it is not clear to what extent each of the SATS scales measures the constructs they are nominally aligned to from either the SATS-M or EVT frameworks.…”