Statistics anxiety and atitudes among undergraduate psychology students

Abstract

Statistics anxiety and negative attitudes toward statistics are common in undergraduate psychology students, which negatively affect progression and experiences in their course. This thesis aimed to comprehensively identify the main problems students experience when studying statistics, how these factors are interrelated, and how they change over time. These were done with the purpose of developing an intervention to reduce such problems. First, feedback was sought from 27 students in focus groups from two universities about experiences of statistics in psychology which indentified the main themes to be studied. Their responses indicated problems were mainly due to the perception that statistics was not relevant to psychology and that statistics was nothing more than mathematics. This study subsequently led to selecting the Statistical Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) and Statistical Attitude Scale (SATS) with appropriate supplementary questions for following studies. The second tested over 200 students in first and second year undergraduate psychology degrees, demonstrating that the subscales of the STARS and SATS were interrelated and were affected by previous mathematics performance, awareness of statistics, and the expectation of using statistics in future careers. It was also reported attitudes and anxieties did not change substantially through the two years. Over 400 students from the United Kingdom, United States, Spain, and Austria then completed the same questionnaires. This exploratory study showed that levels of statistics anxiety and attitudes, as well as many background factors, varied heavily between locations. A final study piloted an intervention aimed at increasing perceptions about the importance and career benefit of statistics in psychology. The implementation may have been flawed, however, as longitudinal measures showed no major effect. Ultimately, this thesis found background factors and previous experiences as major influences on statistics anxiety and attitudes. These must be addressed to improve student learning and experiences in undergraduate psychology programmes.

Date of Award	Dec 2009
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Martin Dempster (Supervisor) & Donncha Hanna (Supervisor)