Abstract
Knowledge is not the only important outcome from statistics courses: students’ attitudes and beliefs about statistics have been widely recognized as important outcomes since the 1990s. Within the statistics education research literature, there has been a proliferation of work using surveys to measure student attitudes (e.g., their interest/enjoyment). However, with most widely used research tools for measuring attitudes about statistics, finding evidence of change in attitudes from pre-course to post-course has been a recurring challenge. A new family of instruments - the Surveys of Motivational Attitudes toward Statistics (SOMAS) - has been developed to measure student attitudes, instructor attitudes and practices, and characteristics of the learning environment to provide researchers with a robust view of statistics attitudes within a course. With an eye toward ‘what works’, this presentation provides an overview of these tools along with results from a large pilot implementation.
