Enhancing students' attitude towards statistics as a tool for building an egalitarian society

This paper analyses the impact of an innovative educative project about teaching and learning data analytics (DA) on secondary students’ attitude towards statistics. The main objective of this research is to contribute on the improvement of students’ attitude and motivation towards learning statistics. A total of 113 students, aged 14-17, participated in this study. Students solved in small groups a social challenge related how weather affects our lives. During the project, students developed key DA (i.e. define problem, explore and analyse data, draw conclusions and make decisions) and they learned to draw evidence-based conclusions to the question 'How does weather affect us?' A pre-post attitude questionnaire towards statistics was built, validated and used in this study. A likert scale questionnaire of 22 questions was adapted and validated and used to evaluate students’ attitude towards statitiscs. The questions were adapted from four well-known and already validated questionnaires and were divided into six dimensions (cognitive competence, technology cognitive competence, learning statistics with technology, affect, self-confidence and anxiety). Our findings show a significant improvement of attitudes towards statistics in the posttest in comparison with the pretest. Statistical knowledge will lead our students to take evidence-based decisions in order to construct a more egalitarian and social justice world