A comparison of strategies used by lecturers to improve students’ perceived feelings towards statistics – a study that’s Stat-tastic!

One way of addressing anxiety in students studying statistics as a non-specialist is dedicated statistics anxiety workshops, but some students are too anxious to attend such sessions. In this multi-university study, lecturers presented content from such a workshop in one slide per session throughout their statistics teaching. This “Stat-tastic thoughts” approach was compared with other strategies, typically used in statistics teaching to address statistics anxiety, by students scoring each strategy for how it affected their feelings toward statistics. While all strategies had a positive effect on feelings, staff approachability, the lecturer's attitude toward the subject, and attempts at humor or fun, consistently scored highest. Our findings suggest that it is these elements of a statistics course that students think statistics educators should concentrate their limited time and energy on to increase their students' positive feelings toward statistics.