Despite its importance in modern curricula, many students find statistics courses challenging, and the existence of barriers among students to learning statistical reasoning is an important area of study. This study explores the presence and level of statistics anxiety in several cohorts of students studying introductory statistics. The relationship with statistical anxiety dependent on specialisms is explored, along with their curricular choices. An online questionnaire was developed to explore the effects of statistical anxiety and attitudes towards learning statistics. Comparisons were made both within and between the cohorts of students and showed that demographic factors and gender play a minor but statistically significant role in explaining levels of statistical anxiety, but that no significant differences in statistics anxiety existed between cohorts.
Summary
Health inequalities are the unfair and avoidable differences in people's health between different social groups. These inequalities have a huge influence on people's lives, particularly those who live at the poorer end of the socio‐economic spectrum, as they result in prolonged ill health and shorter lives. Most studies estimate health inequalities for a single disease, but this will give an incomplete picture of the overall inequality in population health. Here we propose a novel multivariate spatiotemporal model for quantifying health inequalities in Scotland across multiple diseases, which will enable us to understand better how these inequalities vary across disease and have changed over time. In developing this model we are interested in estimating health inequalities between Scotland's 14 regional health boards, who are responsible for the protection and improvement of their population's health. The methodology is applied to hospital admissions data for cerebrovascular disease, coronary heart disease and respiratory disease, which are three of the leading causes of death, from 2003 to 2012 across Scotland.
In March 2020, staff and students at UK universities had to suddenly transition from on-campus teaching to remote learning as a result of the pandemic, which continued throughout the 2020/21 academic year. Unlike traditional online learners, students may lack the motivation or confidence to learn as effectively online particularly for modules such as statistics which students often find difficult or stressful face to face.This paper uses survey results from students studying elective and compulsory statistics modules in the 2020/21 academic year to gain an insight into remote learning of statistics from the students’ perspective.When compared to previous face to face teaching of statistics, students were less likely to actively engage with material, ask for help or work with peers remotely. Emotional wellbeing, motivation to learn, statistics anxiety and having a suitable learning environment all impacted on being able to learn statistics remotely. Although statistics anxiety in online teaching situations was generally lower, there was no evidence to suggest anxious students would benefit from online learning going forward.
We describe a study that explored perceptions and experiences of statistics students at universities in the United Kingdom who had to adjust to learning online as a result of COVID-19 restrictions. Students from two universities (one research-intensive, the other with a teaching focus), and groups of first- through third-year students from five undergraduate statistics courses were surveyed. The wellbeing of students studying online differed between the two universities, and wellbeing was related to students’ experiences of learning remotely, with more negative wellbeing scores associated with worsening online learning experiences. Students did not feel they interacted as well with their peers or lecturers in an online learning environment compared to in-person learning. This study can inform statistics educators how to better support their students’ learning.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.