What Do Instructors Think About Teaching Statistics?

Abstract

Through an NSF IUSE grant (Developing Validated Instruments to Measure Student/Faculty Attitudes in Undergraduate Statistics and Data Science Education; DUE-2013392), our research team is developing a family of validated instrument to measure the students’ attitudes toward learning statistics, instructors' attitudes toward teaching statistics, and learning environment. Measuring instructor attitudes and environment allows identification of features related to improvement of student attitudes. The instructor version of the Survey of Motivational Attitudes toward Statistics (I-SOMAS) is based on Expectancy-Value Theory (Eccles et al., 1983; Eccles & Wigfield 2002) is a first of its kind to measure statistics-instructors’ attitudes. We will present our item development process and the psychometric properties for the most recent I-SOMAS pilot administration. Statistics instructors and educational researchers who are interested in being involved with data collection in future phases of the project are encouraged to contact the authors.