The Importance of Long-Term Retention: Preparing Students for the Workforce, Not Just for Our Tests

• Activity Number: 129
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2016 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Michael Posner* and Meghan Buckley
• Companies: Villanova University and Villanova University
• Keywords: Statistics Education ; Attitudes ; Employability

Abstract

Students often leave college statistics classes with poor attitudes. While this is demoralizing for us and bad for our profession, how important is it really? Shouldn't we only care about whether they know statistics and whether they retain content knowledge long-term? I think the answer to this is no, but.show me the data! This study examines long-term retention of students. Three years after taking an introductory business statistics course, students were given an attitude and content survey. Factors associated with different attitude subscales and content mastery were evaluated and courses taken during this time were included in the models. We show that students who liked statistics at the end of the course and completed the survey were more likely to retain more material. The details and implications of these findings will be discussed.