Study of Attitudes Toward Statistics in Psychology Students

Abstract

Statistics has been incorporated in most university courses and among them in the degree of Psychology, where the teaching of statistical concepts presents specific learning problems, because students enrolled have a very heterogeneous mathematical basis. In this work, we focus on the study of those students' attitudes for their influence on the learning process and we analyze it through the Scale of Attitudes toward Statistics of Estrada, Spanish acronym EAEE (ESTRADA, 2002). The results indicate moderate or positive attitudes in general with an overall average score slightly higher than the theoretical position of indifference. The course and the previous studies in this area affect their attitude. We emphasize that the overall attitude towards statistics is worsened by the increase of the number years of studies, although the total lowest scores are presented in students who never studied statistics, results that invite us to reflect on how statistics has been taught through the different educational levels.

Keywords:
Attitudes; Scales; Statistics; Psychology students