The SATS-36 Questionnaire

This study examined the responses of 303 undergraduate students from UKZN registered for an Introductory Statistics module, and then developed factors based on the SATS-36 questionnaire. The initial set of questions answered by participants perhaps captured a domain similar to what was measured on the SATS questionnaire (Schau et al., 1995). In the UKZN study it was found that approximately 60% of students indicated a positive attitude toward Statistics, which is similar to prior findings of some other studies in the literature (Coetzee and van der Merwe, 2010; Mills, 2004). Mogane (2010) also explains that students bring their own unique strengths and weaknesses, experiences, attitudes and understanding to the classroom, where a positive
The approach chosen to investigate this question was factor analysis, where exploratory factor (EFA) analysis was performed for the data, to explore the possible underlying factor structure. We fixed our n=6 factors, so as to compare with those of the SATS-36 (Schau et al., 1995). The way the items fitted into each factor group themselves was not surprising at all, they further went to validate those groupings defined by Schau et al. (1995) namely: affect, effort, difficulty, cognitive competence, interest and value. In addition to these we identified demographic factors which influenced the attitudes to Statistics.
How do students’ attitudinal dispositions relate to their demographic attributes?
The idea that there could be a link between the attitudes and the demographics factors emerged from the South African study described in the Introduction. Eight of the demographic variables had a relationship with the attitudinal dispositions, with gender and age having no significant relationship with any of the attitudinal dispositions. Interest was a significant factor in seven of the eight demographic dispositions, i.e. students had fairly high interests towards the STAT130 module. Verhoeven (2009) did a similar study in the Netherlands and found gender to be a factor that influences the attitudes of students, a finding which coincides with that of Coetzee and van
In several studies a small to modest relationship between Statistics attitudes and Statistics achievement was observed (Vanhoof, 2010). In our study we found cognitive competence to be the only significant variable in determining students’ overall performance in introductory Statistics. This further confirms the South African scenario, where students do not know about Statistics as they enter university, and only have their intellectual knowledge and skills to depend on, with very poor career counselling at school level in the majority of cases (Timmey and Chapman, 2012)