A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of the Relationships among Post-secondary Students’ Attitudes Toward Statistics and Statistics Achievement

Abstract

Background: An understanding of statistics is essential in our data-driven world. Accordingly, successful completion of a statistics course is required for undergraduate and graduate students from many disciplines. Attitudes toward statistics is a multidimensional construct that expresses individuals’ positive or negative dispositions to statistics. A wide body of research indicates that there are statistically significant relationships among attitudes toward statistics and statistics achievement. However, the reported magnitudes of these relationships differ across studies.  Methods/Design: This review will examine the relationships among post-secondary students’ scores on the attitude components assessed by the Survey of Attitudes toward Statistics (SATS) and their statistics achievement assessed using a variety of measures. As the data allow, this review then will explore the impact of possible moderating research characteristics including, for example, those associated with research sources, institutions, courses, subjects, and the SATS and statistics achievement measures. Discussion: In the resulting journal article, this section will focus on the results and the strengths and limitations of the synthesized literature. We expect that the study will contribute to the literature on the relationship between attitudes toward statistics and achievement by synthesizing the individual research results. The availability of the required information and the quality of primary studies will be potential limitations for the current study.