Students’ Conceptions of Statistics: An Exploration of Attitudes across Majors

Abstract

Students from different majors taking statistics course view their statistics learning experience differently. In this work, a survey of 440 undergraduate students from various majors who took an introductory statistics course at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) in Fall 2012 or earlier semesters was conducted. Analysis of the survey data showed that 66% of the students have positive attitude toward statistics. Engineering majors who indicated the most negative attitude toward statistics associated their negativity to difficulty of the topic and the teaching method. Social sciences majors reported ‘general dislike of mathematics’ as the most significant contributing factor to their negative attitude toward statistics. Students with architecture and design majors were the most to associate their negative attitude toward statistics to its nonuse in their future career. On contrary, natural sciences’ students were most likely to believe that statistics is an interesting topic and would be used in future career. Female students were also more likely than male students to find statistics related to their field of study and future career. Some implications of the findings for future teaching of statistics were discussed.