Faculty Forum t for Two: Using Mnemonics to Teach Statistics

This article provides a list of statistical mnemonics for instructor use. This article also reports on the potential for such mnemonics to help students learn, enjoy, and become less apprehensive about statistics. Undergraduates from two sections of a psychology statistics course rated 8 of 11 mnemonics as significantly memorable and helpful in learning statistics. Undergraduates rated the 3 remaining mnemonics as helpful after excluding students who did not recall those mnemonics (beyond scale midpoint). Other measures indicated a relatively high regard for the overall use of statistical mnemonics. In particular, mnemonics were rated as motivating and fun. Students also reported moderate belief that mnemonics could reduce statistics anxiety. The variety of positive findings suggests strong promise for statistical mnemonics. Keywords mnemonics, statistics anxiety, statistics education Statistics is one of the most anxiety-producing subjects for college students, including social science majors (e.g., Kher, Molstad, & Donahue, 1999; Onwuegbuzie & Wilson, 2003). In fact, interest in psychology negatively correlates with inter-est in math (Stalder, 2002). Finding ways to make statistics material more accessible seems especially important for psy-chology majors who need statistics to succeed in the research methods course, to conduct independent research, and to understand research articles. Because statistics and research methods are often core courses in the undergraduate social science curriculum (Perlman & McCann, 2005), improving students ’ relationship with statistics is a critical first step in improving student engagement across the curriculum. Among helpful learning methods, mnemonics have received support for statistics, research methods, and other material (e.g., Carney & Levin