Study Design & Quantitative Analysis in Learning and Teaching Scholarship: Case Study Exploring Student Attitudes to Introductory Statistics

This talk describes the design, execution and analysis phases of a scholarship project undertaken to better understand students’ attitudes to studying introductory statistics at university. Specifically, the scholarship project adds to the understanding of issues surrounding statistical anxiety and self-efficacy and their relationship with performance by examining three cohorts of students. Within each cohort, students were asked about their demographic and academic backgrounds and their general attitudes to studying statistics via both qualitative and quantitative questions. To enable comparisons with previous studies, validated instruments measuring statistical anxiety and general self-efficacy were administered to students to quantify these characteristics. Finally, the responses were matched with grades obtained in the course as a measure of performance. The emphasis of the talk will be on illustrating key issues of quantitative scholarship using the practicalities of the project, especially the approaches taken to: 1. Design and administer a survey using Moodle to provide both quantitative and qualitative information on students’ attitudes and backgrounds 2. Extract and prepare data for analysis 3. Analyse the data and disseminate the findings 4. Implement changes to course design and teaching practice in light of the findings 5. Reflections on this scholarshi