Abstract

Upon research, University of Iowa professor emeritus of statistics Robert Hogg claimed that "students frequently view statistics as the worst course taken in college." I seek to better understand why this is the case by considering various factors that influence students’ motivation and success in college statistics courses. I use a recently developed set of questions from a survey already given to the University of Colorado’s (UNC) 54 intro-level statistics students, implementing the survey on the College of Wooster’s 46 200-level statistics students and comparing data findings between the two cohorts. The survey contains items pertaining to the components course anxiety, attitude toward statistics, perceived course difficulty, perception of the course professor, level of interest in statistics, and pre-college statistics exposure, each of which I consider to be motivation measures. I find that UNC students had a surprising negative correlation between attitude and perceived difficulty, possibly signaling overconfidence among those disliking statistics, while Wooster’s students had a weak positive correlation. Linear regression shows that professor ratings are largely unaffected by course anxiousness, statistics attitudes, and perceived difficulty in both classes, but the other component scores more strongly influence each other. Ordinal logistic regression reveals that course anxiousness strongly predicts exam grades in both classes (p < 0.05 for both), while all other factors are somewhat or much weaker at predicting exam grades. Cronbach’s alpha analysis shows that UNC’s components generally showed stronger internal consistency than Wooster’s, despite strong item associations for the Anxiety, Attitude, and Professor components in both datasets.

Advisor

Murphy, Jake

Department

Statistical and Data Sciences

Disciplines

Cognitive Science | Science and Mathematics Education

Publication Date

2025

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

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© Copyright 2025 Kiran Ravichandran