Approaches to Learning in Statistics

Abstract

In the last decade, Australian higher education institutions have become a destination for many international students, mainly from South East Asia. If their educational culture is quite different to the Australian educational culture, then their approaches to learning might be different to that of local students. The aim of this pilot study was to investigate the approaches to learning of students in statistics units and relate these to background variables such as country of origin, gender and work commitments. This study is significant because there are many international students at Macquarie University and no data of this type has been collected for our students in the past.Our analyses showed that there were no significant differences in the approaches to learning of local and international; and male and female students; however, we found a significant difference between undergraduate and postgraduate students, with postgraduates more likely to adopt deep strategies to learning.

Impact of support of teacher and compatibility with needs of study on usefulness of SPSS by students

“…The result is expected since postgraduate students are more experienced, not necessary in performing statistical analyses but regarding theoretical knowledge; during the preparation of bachelor thesis and during the studies at the postgraduate level, they very likely had the opportunity to recognize the usefulness of results provided by statistical methods and tools. Moreover, this interpretation is consistent with findings of Bilgin and Crowe (2008) that postgraduates approach to the learning of statistics differently as compared to undergraduates, especially by inter-relating the previous relevant knowledge within the learning process. Besides this, postgraduate students are more likely to have the real-life business work experience that further highlight the importance of usefulness of statistics to them.…”

“…Past researches have pointed out that both groups differ regarding different aspects when the act of learning and performing statistics is taking place (Bilgin & Crowe, 2008;Shultz & Koshino, 1998), therefore it can be expected, that the average levels of perceived six multidimensional variables included into the research model in Fig. 1, significantly differ between the two groups.…”

A critique of the deep and surface approaches to learning model

“…Subsequent research has pointed to the influence of the model in the stereotyping of Asian students as learners who use a surface approach. (Bilgin and Crowe 2008;Donald and Jackling 2007;Kember 2000).…”

Educational goals, assessment preferences and approaches to learning of MBA and MPA students in Singapore

“…The R-SPQ-2F model has been widely used to examine SAL at undergraduate level from different disciplines such as biology (Skogsberg & Clump, 2003), information systems (Halawi, McCarthy, & Muoghalu, 2009), law (Gijbels, Van de Waterning, Dochy, & Van de Bossche, 2005), mathematics (Chan & Mousley, 2005), management (M'Hamed Taher & Chen, 2011), nursing (Bernal & Montalbo, 2014;Snelgrove & Slater, 2003), psychology (Justicia, Pichardo, Cano, Berbén, & De la Fuente, 2008;Skogsberg & Clump, 2003), science (Güner & Ali Riza, 2008;Zeegers, 2001), and statistics (Bilgin & Crowe, 2008). Most of these studies focused on undergraduate students and none of these studies examined postgraduate students in Singapore.…”