Reflections of different practices in introductory statistics courses on the changes in students' attitudes towards statistics

The aim of this study was to examine whether different practices in Statistics courses have statistically significant effect on the changes in students' attitudes towards statistics or not. What kind of a role different teaching practices play on attitudes towards statistics was also examined based on the opinions of the students who took statistics courses. Causal-comparative design was used in this study and the sample of this study consists of 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade students in different departments in a public university located in Central Black Sea Region. The research was conducted in the Fall semester of 2016-2017 academic year. In this study, data were collected from 197 students who took both pre-test, post-test and their answers were matched. "Survey of Attitudes Towards Statistics-36 (Schau, 2003; Emmioğlu, 2011)" and "Student Survey of Statistics Course Characteristics (Schau, 2019)" were used as data collection tools. SPSS analysis programme was used for analysing the quantitative data. In the analysis of quantitative data, mean and standard deviation values were presented as descriptive statistics and hierarchical multiple regression was used as inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics was used in analysing qualitative data. Results revealed that, students' attitudes towards statistics changed after they started taking statistics course. Mean values of the Affect, Cognitive Competence, Value, and Interest, subscales have changed towards negative attitudes but Effort and Difficulty subscales have changed towards positive attitudes. This outcome was also supported by the opinions of students. It was observed that different teaching practices that were used during statistics courses do not have a statistically significant effect on students' attitudes towards statistics apart from the Difficulty subscale. The qualitative data from this study also supports this finding.