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This paper is from Session 9B: Teaching Statistics in African and other developing countries
which comes under Topic 9: An international perspective on Statistics education             Full topic list


(Thursday 6th, 14:00-15:30)

Factors influencing the Psychology student in dealing with Statistics courses


Presenter


Abstract

Psychology students usually rate Statistics courses among the most difficult. The objective of the present study is to explore some aspects of the difficulties encountered by Psychology students in studying statistics and how these difficulties relate to statistics anxiety. A questionnaire measuring Psychology students’ evaluation of the level of difficulty of the statistics courses studied; together with their opinions concerning the reasons for these difficulties was administered to a sample of 152 female undergraduate Psychology students at Cairo University. In addition, a measure of statistics anxiety was also used. Difficulties reported by students were in five categories in the following order: course content, teaching, examinations, relevance of statistics, and student characteristics. The perceived level of difficulty and abstraction were related to attitudes and opinions towards statistics and to the grades of the previous year.