What Changes Students’ Attitudes? A Qualitative Panel Study on How and Why Attitudes Toward an Introductory Statistics Course Change

Change in attitudes toward statistics during introductory courses has been shown to have a major impact on learning success. Although attitudes pre- and post-introductory courses have therefore been widely studied, there is a lack of research on how attitudes evolve during the course. Only Kerby and Wroughton (2017) include a measurement at midterm and find some roughly v-shaped progressions of attitudes. The present study shows a different development in a qualitative panel study with six students and four interviews per student. The main reason for changes in attitudes is identified as the current course content, which changes how mathematical, difficult, interesting, and valuable statistics is currently perceived to be. The findings show the reciprocal relationship between topic-related emotions and domain-related attitudes.