How to Understand Education Graduate Students' Anxiety in Online Statistics Learning

• In Event: Development and Validation of Survey Instruments

Abstract

In general, education graduate students need to take quantitative research courses to master essential skills and knowledge in educational research. Also, there is an increasing trend that graduate programs offer online courses as alternatives to serve students’ needs. Nonetheless, students’ lack of statistical background and the challenges of adapting to the online learning setting can increase their statistics anxiety. Previous research studied statistics anxiety in other disciplines. Thus, by creating one effective instrument via Qualtrics, this study investigated the experiences of education graduate students’ statistics anxiety in online learning. The results indicate that students enjoyed online learning’s self-management features but preferred traditional learning interactions. Despite recognizing its importance, students considered the course challenging and were insecure about their learning.

Authors

• Clarisse Halpern, Florida Gulf Coast University

• Jingshun Zhang, Florida Gulf Coast University

• Shahid Rasool, Retail Business

• Sharon Paz, Florida Gulf Coast University

• Xiangming Li, Tsinghua University