Tackling the anxiety of learning statistics: The mystery of the red envelope

Abstract

Most graduate programs in management require students to carry out a substantive research project. However, few management students have a comfortable command of the statistical techniques needed to realize such quantitative projects. This can lead to student anxiety and stress, which challenges instructors to devise ways to build students’ self-efficacy with statistical analysis. Drawing on game-based learning principles, we developed an exercise to help students in a graduate-level research methods course practice these statistical techniques. Designed around a series of four gamified challenges, students perform basic statistical analyses (correlations, t-tests, and simple linear regression) to solve puzzles and unlock a reward hidden in a mysterious red envelope. We used the exercise on seven occasions (five times in the methods course and twice in a graduate program preparatory course). After launching it in fall 2021, we observed that students were engaged and enthusiastic about the exercise. To ascertain its effectiveness more systematically, we collected data in five subsequent sections using a pretest/posttest design (N = 84) which showed that perceptions of statistics self-efficacy increased following the exercise. We conclude by suggesting that our exercise can be tailored to other learning contexts such as management and statistics-centered courses.