Teaching statistics to Psychology students: two strategies to overcome some limitations

BOLOGNA, EDUARDO; VAIMAN, MARCELO; MOLA, DEBORA; BOBBIO, ANTONELLA; MARTÍNEZ, MILAGROS; RIVAROLA MONTEJANO, GABRIELA

Congreso; International Association for Statistical Education (IASE) 2023 Satellite Conference ?Fostering Learning of Statistics and Data Science; 2023

In introductory courses to statistics in psychology, a significant part of the students face difficultiesrelated to the usefulness of statistics in their future professions, which is added to the lack ofconfidence in their own abilities to address highly structured content, often expressed in a formalizedway. Frequently, the decision to study Psychology implies the belief that it will not be necessary toreturn to the mathematical contents, often remembered as threatening. These prior beliefs refer to the"cognitive competence" and "value" components of the SATS, and appear as the main drawbacks forlearning statistics. Existing literature shows the clear relationship between attitudes and academicperformance.The Department of Psychostatistics - Faculty of Psychology - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba(Argentina) proposes i) to make statistical learning meaningful, ii) to link analytical strategies to realissues in psychology and iii) to make learning lasting for its future application in courses of quantitativemethodology and psychometrics.To face the aforementioned limitations when taking an introductory course in statistics in the first yearof the degree, a two-level strategy was implemented. On the one hand, the contents are introducedfrom real data, prepared by the students themselves, and the analysis operations are presented asanswers to questions about the data. On the other hand, optionally, for more motivated students, anactivity also focused on the data is proposed, to delve into the contents in a playful context.The preliminary results of the strategy show that i) students come to express definitions of conceptswithout resorting to memorization, ii) statistical analysis make sense since they are means to answerquestions of interest, iii) more and more students decide to participate in the optional proposal, iv) atthe end of the course, they state that they have perceived the usefulness of the subject for the degree.