What do Your Students Struggle with? A Survey of Statistics Instructors

Abstract

College students persistently find statistics courses difficult. In the past, researchers have attributed this difficulty to students’ negative attitudes and anxiety toward statistics. Researchers have also attributed this difficulty to students’ weak algebraic and arithmetic skills. Although these things undoubtedly contribute to students’ difficulty in statistics, there may be other, unaddressed causes of students’ difficulty in statistics. We surveyed statistics instructors about several aspects of conceptual understanding and problem solving–things that statistics students also struggle with–and how difficult instructors thought these aspects were for their students to master. We also asked instructors how relevant they thought each aspect was for succeeding in a statistics course. Each aspect was presented as a contrast (e.g., conceptual vs. procedural understanding, interrelated vs. isolated concepts, applied vs. simple recall problems). The pattern of instructors’ responses suggests that a contributing factor to students’ difficulty in statistics is the highly abstract nature of many aspects of statistics. Future research may want to focus on supporting statistics students’ abstraction skills.

Keywords

• statistics education
• conceptual understanding
• problem solving
• abstraction
• undergraduate
• anxiety