Question of the Week: Can a Low-Stakes Assignment Improve Students’ Attitudes?

Abstract

Many statistics education researchers have found that statistics students’ attitudes tend to decrease over the duration of a course. Although many researchers have tried to incorporate a variety of activities and/or teaching methods to improve student attitudes, many are not only very time consuming to implement, but have also not shown many favorable results. In the study presented here, the inclusion of a low-stakes and easy-to-implement assignment and its effect on student attitudes is investigated. Although the results presented here did not show large changes, they suggest that some changes in students’ attitudes can be made with a small change in a course.

Keywords

• introductory statistics
• low-stakes assessment
• real-world application
• student attitudes