Learning Probability and Statistics: Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Factors Related to Psychology Students’ Achievement.

The aim of the present is to ascertain the impact of both cognitive and non-cognitive factors on probabilistic and statistics reasoning in psychology students enrolled in introductory statistics courses. It was hypothesised that performance was related to the student’s general and mathematical background (cognitive factors), math self-efficacy and attitudes toward statistics (non-cognitive factors). A structural equation model was specified in which cognitive and non-cognitive factors were considered as the exogenous latent variables having an impact on both probabilistic and statistics reasoning. Results stressed the role of both cognitive and non cognitive factors suggesting that competence as well as attitudes and self-efficacy should be the focus in planning interventions to help students in increasing performance.