The postgraduate students’ (masters, PhD) metaphors about education of statistic

Abstract

Statistics is an important part of our life when it comes to economy, education, sport, politics and research. Research is a primary job for the ones pursuing academic career and statistics is one of the basic components of a research. Metaphor is used as an equivalent to figurative expression (‘mecaz’ in Turkish language). Study group is composed of 19 females (age 27.7) and 40 males (age 30.85) - 59 students in total. Demographic information of participants was collected. Participants were provided with questionnaire in order to assess their metaphorical creation whereby they were asked to fill in the sentence - “statistics is like/ similar to …, because…” - with metaphor. The study has collected total of 59 metaphors in 6 categories. The most created metaphor is in ‘discovering/ revealing’ category. 42.5% of Master’s students and 25% of PhD students are in this category. Metaphors created by graduate students are representing their views about statistics course and hence their view about importance of research. The category ‘discovering/ revealing’, the one with the most created metaphor of this study, is the main concept of science. Consequently, good knowledge of statistics is needed for graduate students to conduct research.

Keywords

• Statistics
• education
• methaphor
• masters