What Do Instructors Think About Teaching Statistics?

• Activity Number: 284 - Assessment Tools in Statistics and Data Science Education
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 9, 2022 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and Data Science Education
• Author(s): Marjorie Bond* and Leyla Batakci and Michael Posner and Douglas Whitaker and April Kerby-Helm and Alana Unfried
• Companies: Monmouth College and Elizabethtown College and Villanova University and Mount Saint Vincent University and Winona State University and CSU Monterey Bay
• Keywords: statistics education; attitudes; undergraduate; expectancy-value theory; survey; psychometrics

Abstract

Through an NSF IUSE grant (Developing Validated Instruments to Measure Student/Faculty Attitudes in Undergraduate Statistics and Data Science Education; DUE-2013392), our research team is developing a family of validated instrument to measure the students’ attitudes toward learning statistics, instructors' attitudes toward teaching statistics, and learning environment. Measuring instructor attitudes and environment allows identification of features related to improvement of student attitudes. The instructor version of the Survey of Motivational Attitudes toward Statistics (I-SOMAS) is based on Expectancy-Value Theory (Eccles et al., 1983; Eccles & Wigfield 2002) is a first of its kind to measure statistics-instructors’ attitudes. We will present our item development process and the psychometric properties for the most recent I-SOMAS pilot administration. Statistics instructors and educational researchers who are interested in being involved with data collection in future phases of the project are encouraged to contact the authors.