Examining the effectiveness of innovative instructional methods on reducing statistics anxiety for graduate students in the social sciences.
Statistics anxiety is prevalent among students whose academic background has little statistical training. The development and psychometric properties of statistics anxiety scales and the factors affecting statistics anxiety have been extensively studied for more than twenty years, but few studies focused on how to reduce the statistics anxiety for graduate students in the social sciences. The present study explores how statistics anxiety can be reduced by various innovative instructional methods. A repeated measures ANCOVA with controlling for individual differences is utilized to analyze a sample data from 21 social science graduate students at a Midwest university. The study shows that the combining application-oriented teaching methods with instructors' attentiveness to students' anxiety is a significantly effective way (p less than 0.02, [eta][superscript 2] = 0.29) to reduce students' anxiety in learning statistics.
