Despite the importance of statistics courses for social science students, many of them find these courses formidable obstacles to the completion of their degrees and report high levels of anxiety about these courses. Understanding the attitudinal factors among students can help instructors improve students’ attitudes toward statistics and their achievement in statistics courses. In this paper, using Pekrun’s control-value theory of achievement emotions, we treat emotions as a central component of students’ attitudes toward statistics and argue that students’ emotions regarding statistics are more complex than simply feeling anxious. We introduce a conceptual model of students’ attitudes toward statistics and describe the data that we are collecting as a preliminary test of the model. Finally the implications of the study will be discussed.

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2017

• Date of Conference: 26-29 June, 2017
• DOI: 10.2053/CICE.2017.0236
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-908320-83-4
• Conference Location: University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada