Abstract #301158

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JSM 2003 Abstract #301158
Activity Number: 87
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2003 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
Abstract - #301158
Title: Examining the Effectiveness of Innovative Instructional Methods on Reducing Statistics Anxiety for Graduate Students in the Social Sciences
Author(s): Wei Pan*+ and Mei Tang
Companies: University of Cincinnati and University of Cincinnati
Address: Educational Studies, Cincinnati, OH, 45221-0002,
Keywords: statistics anxiety ; statistics education
Abstract:

Statistics anxiety is prevalent among students whose academic background has little statistical training. In the literature, the development and psychometric properties of statistics anxiety scales and the factors affecting statistics anxiety have been extensively studied for more than twenty years, but few studies focused on how to reduce the statistics anxiety for graduate students in the social sciences. The present study explores how statistics anxiety can be reduced by various innovative instructional methods. A pre-post repeated-measures design with controlling for demographics and academic background is employed to analyze a sample collected from 21 social science graduate students at a Midwest university. The results show that the problem-based teaching methods combined with the instructors' attentiveness to students' anxiety is a significantly effective way (p < .007, eta-squared = .352) to reduce students' anxiety in learning statistics.

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