Abstract
<p style="text-align:justify">Positive attitude towards statistics is a desirable aspect in developing statistical thinking and understanding statistical concept. The attitude towards statistics instrument in previous study on rural school students lacked evidence in the validity analysis. Therefore, there is a need to provide a valid instrument that can assess rural secondary school students’ attitude toward statistics. For this purpose, this study was carried out to investigate the validity and reliability analysis of the Survey Attitude towards Statistics (SATS-36) instrument from a sample of rural secondary school students. The SATS-36 is a 7-point Likert type scale questionnaire, used to measure students’ attitude towards statistics. The SATS-36 instrument was distributed to 217 Tenth grade science stream students from a rural district in Sabah, Malaysia, which comprised of 66 (30.4%) boys and 151 (69.6%) girls. A second order Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was carried out to analyze the validity of the SATS-36 instrument as well as to confirm the 6-factor model of SATS-36. The reliability of SATS-36 instrument was assessed through the Cronbach’s Alpha value. Overall, the analysis showed that the SATS-36 instrument shows favorable indices for both its validity and reliability. Thus, it can be concluded that the SATS-36 was a valid and reliable instrument for measuring students’ attitude towards statistics among rural science stream secondary school students.</p>
Highlights
Developing a positive attitude towards statistics among the students is one of the main goals in statistical teaching
I will make a lot of mathematical errors in statistics
Statistics conclusions are often presented in everyday life
Summary
Developing a positive attitude towards statistics among the students is one of the main goals in statistical teaching. Attitude is defined by Fishbein and Ajzen (2010) as a tendency to react on a psychological object with some degree of favorableness or unfavorableness. Students’ attitude towards statistics referred to the degree of students’ positive and negative feelings towards the statistical subjects, which is related to the value and importance, self-efficacy and difficulty, and overall impression toward the subject (Evans, 2007). According to Vanhoof, Kuppens, Sotos, Verschaffel and Onghena (2011), attitudes toward statistics is a multidimensional aspect referring to separate, but related tendencies associated to the favorable or unfavorable reactions concerning to statistics. Emmioglu and Capa-Aydin (2012) on the other hand defined attitude towards statistics as tendencies of the students to respond negatively or positively to statistics According to Vanhoof, Kuppens, Sotos, Verschaffel and Onghena (2011), attitudes toward statistics is a multidimensional aspect referring to separate, but related tendencies associated to the favorable or unfavorable reactions concerning to statistics. Martins, Nascimento and Estrada (2011) described attitudes towards statistics as intense feelings which are relatively stable and results from positive or negative experiences encountered whilst learning statistical subject over a period. Emmioglu and Capa-Aydin (2012) on the other hand defined attitude towards statistics as tendencies of the students to respond negatively or positively to statistics
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