Chapter 25: Leveraging Statistics Anxiety and Other Promising Practices

Literature on teaching statistics and research can be summarized nicely with this quote from the preface to Best Practices for Teaching Statistics and Research Methods in the Behavioral Sciences (Dunn, Smith, & Beins, 2007).

When teaching graduate students in colleges of education, we have found this problem to be particularly pronounced. Our students include pre- and in-service teachers, counselors-in-training, nascent educational researchers, and the next generation of educational psychologists. Not merely “some” students, but most of our students report “fear and trepidation” at the outset in response to research methodology and statistics, and the mathematics involved. Our goal as instructors is to overcome that fear to allow students to experience success with these difficult concepts. We do this, not by lowering the bar, but by addressing issues of anxiety head-on while holding high expectations for our students and providing high levels of support as they learn to apply concepts from lectures and textbooks into real world research and evaluation projects. It is through real world application, while directly confronting anxiety, that students develop deep and rich understandings of the material in our courses.