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Abstract:
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Negative attitude towards can adversely affect student performance in statistics classes. Often times the anxiety of mathematics can influence less than potential performance of some students. Negative attitude and anxiety could lead to low motivation and impede the chance of students doing well in lower level statistics classes. Lower level classes are the recruiting ground for upper level of classes. Nolan et al. (2012) conducted a comprehensive report on instruments to measure students’ attitudes toward statistics and found 15 instruments that “purportedly assess students’ attitudes,” and of those, four instruments that had “substantial content, substantive, structural, and external validity evidence, as well as internal consistency.” The four instruments are: the SAS, ATS, SATS-28, and SATS-36. Pittsburg State University is a regional university in southeast Kansas. We conducted a survey using SATS-36 among about 300 undergraduate students, mostly freshmen taking the first course in statistics and 101 responded. Results of tis study will be discussed in this paper.
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