A Topic-Specific Evaluation of Students’ Attitudes Towards Statistics

This study involves an evaluation of students’ attitudes towards various topics in statistics. The purpose of the study is to determine how students’ attitudes towards statistics vary across different topics and to determine possible changes in students’ attitudes from the beginning to the end of a course. The target population is that of students taking a statistics course for non-majors at a university in Nigeria. The study involved a pre-test (within the first week of the course) and a post-test (applied at the end of the course) focused on specific topics in the statistics course. Results indicated that students’ attitudes were moderately positive at the onset and remained the same at the end of the course for most topics. Implications for teaching statistics are discussed.