CHALLENGES ASSOCIATED WITH MEASURING ATTITUDES USING THE SATS FAMILY OF INSTRUMENTS

Abstract

The Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS) is a widely used family of instruments for measuring attitude constructs in statistics education. Since the development of the SATS instruments, there has been an evolution in the understanding of validity in the field of educational measurement emphasizing validation as an on-going process. While a 2012 review of statistics education attitude instruments noted that the SATS family had the most validity evidence, two types of challenges to the use of these instruments have emerged: challenges to the interpretations of scale scores and challenges using the SATS instruments in populations other than undergraduate students enrolled in introductory statistics courses. A synthesis of the literature and empirical results are used to document these challenges.