Anxiety towards statistics and its relationship with students’ attitudes and learning approach

Abstract

Many university students have difficulties when facing statistics related tasks, leading to an increase in their levels of anxiety and poor performance. Researchers have identified negative attitudes towards statistics, which have been shaped through students’ secondary education experience, as a major driver for their failure. In this study we want to uncover the causal recipes of attitudes leading to high and low levels of anxiety in secondary education students, and the role that the learning approach plays in these relationships. We used fuzzy sets comparative qualitative analysis (fsQCA) in a sample of 325 students surveyed on the multifactorial scale of attitudes toward statistics (MSATS) and the revised two factor study process questionnaire (R-SPQ-2F). The results indicate that, respectively, a high or a low level of self-confidence is the most important and a sufficient condition by itself for achieving a low or a high level of anxiety, while the learning approaches and other attitudes are only present in other causal combinations that represent a small number of cases.