Attitudes and learning approaches: modelling a pathway to achievement in statistics.

Research focused on improving statistics education may be able to identify variables that attenuate or accentuate statistical learning. The aim of the present study was to investigate university students’ achievement in introductory statistics courses taking into account their attitudes toward the discipline and their learning approaches. Data were collected from psychology students (N = 130; 71% female; mean age = 20.94, SD = 3.65) enrolled in an undergraduate introductory statistics course at the University of Florence in Italy. Using structural equation modelling (SEM), we investigated the impact of attitudes (the exogenous latent variable in the model) on the learning strategies adopted by students (the endogenous latent variable) and the consequent effect on achievement (the outcome variable). Observed variables were the four components of statistics attitudes (affect, cognitive competence, difficulty, and value) as measures by the Survey of Attitudes toward Statistics scale (SATS, Schau et al., 1995), the deep, surface, and strategic approaches measured by an abbreviated version (Chiesi et al., 2015) of the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST, Tait et al., 1998), and the achievement, which was assessed considering students’ midterm grade (assigned through a written task including problems, and multiple-choice and open-ended questions) and taking into account when students failed to pass the test. The results attested that the hypothesized model showed a good fit to the data (2/df = 1.84; CFI = .95; TLI = .93; RMSEA = .08), and all the measurement coefficients were statistically significant and in the expected directions as well as the estimated structural coefficients. Specifically, a positive relationship (.54) was observed between the attitudes and the learning strategies (more positive the attitudes, more strategic and deeper the adopted approaches), which in turn were positively related (.32) to achievement (more strategic and deeper the approaches adopted, higher the achievement). Findings suggest the need to promote positive attitudes toward statistics to prompt the adoption of learning approaches which helps students in achieving a good performance and avoiding failures in introductory statistics courses.