Challenges assessing statistics attitudes: opportunities and costs

Abstract

Eccles and colleagues’ Expectancy-value theory (EVT; 1983) has been widely-used in education research, and the cost component of this framework has recently been the subject of increased research. While advances in measuring the cost component have been made (e.g., Flake et al., 2015), an on-going instrument development project for measuring attitudes in statistics education has encountered difficulties that motivate a deeper look at this construct. An overview of cost in EVT, the current state of measuring it in statistics education, and plans for a new study are described. The first project-specific data are to be collected in Spring 2020.