Background
lLevel 1 Psychology practical laboratory course involves use of statistics.
lStudents complete a course in statistics but not until second year
lInitial survey found that students lacked confidence in statistics and required additional support.
¡They are not alone (Onwuegbuzie and Wilson 2003)
lUse of on-line tutorials as part of a blended approach in teaching of statistics (Utts et al., 2003).
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Mix of taught and drop in labs. Use of statistics-descriptive stats and T-tests.
Little formal teaching of stats at level 1, take a course run by the statistics dept in Level 2
We surveyed student’s confidence with basic statistical concepts, and found they lacked confidence and would find additional support (e.g., on-line tutorials) beneficial.
Not just a problem in psychology or in our department-a great deal of previous research has shown that students have high levels of ‘statistics anxiety’ in many courses where statistics is a component (as much as 2 thirds).
An approach to this problem has been to introduce additional on-line support in statistics, either as a stand alone tutorial or as part of a blended approach. This approach has been successful, and reduced teaching hours required.
This is an issue with the large class sizes in psychology (up to 500)-would be difficult to provide additional statistics classes on top of current laboratory teaching.