Undergraduate Social Sciences Students' Attitudes Toward Statistics

This study investigated the changes in undergraduate social sciences students’ attitudes toward statistics in an introductory statistics course for social science students. The relationships between students’ attitudes toward statistics and their past mathematics achievement, their statistics outcomes, their sex, and their year of study were also investigated. The Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS-36©) was used to collect data on students’ attitudes toward statistics. The study found no significant differences between male and female students’ attitudes toward statistics. Moreover, no significant differences in attitudes were found by year of study of the participants. By the end of their introductory statistics course, students’ attitudes improved for those students with low initial scores regarding their feelings concerning statistics, their competency in doing statistics, their valuing of the subject in their personal and professional lives, their perception of the difficulty of the subject, and their efforts to learn statistics. However, their interest in statistics remained the same. Students’ attitudes-scores dropped for those students with high initial responses regarding their competency to do statistics, their valuing of the subject, and their interest in statistics. Their feelings concerning statistics, their perception of the difficulty of the subject, and their effort to learn statistics remained the same. Students’ past mathematics achievement, their valuing of, and their effort to learn statistics predicted their statistics outcomes by the end of the course. Additionally, students’ interest in statistics predicted their effort to learn statistics and their valuing of the subject by the end of the course, which contributed to their statistics outcomes. The results also revealed that, students’ past mathematics achievement, and their perception of the difficulty of the subject predicted their cognitive competence in statistics, and their cognitive competence predicted their affect toward statistics by the end of the course.Ph.D