Advancing Statistics Education Among Social Sciences Students: Investigating the Relations Between Statistical and Spatial Cognition as well as Existing Tests on Statistics Understanding

Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to improve the education of statistics. The main idea of this contribution comes from Numerical Cognition, which relates mathematics to space. Since mathematics is related to statistics, could there be a study of Statistical Cognition examining the role of space in statistics education? It is the goal that this thesis will examine through three studies. Study A examines the relations between spatial, mathematics and statistics anxieties. A total of 778 participants - recruited from Canadian, French and Belgian universities - were asked to complete a questionnaire measuring their spatial, mathematics and statistics anxieties. The results indicate that all variables are related, and that spatial anxiety predicts statistics anxiety. Study B looks at visuospatial working memory (Study 1; N = 306) and spatial problem-solving skills (Study 2; N = 374), and their relation to statistics anxiety. Using the same population, we asked participants to complete the same questionnaire as well as two tasks (one measuring visuospatial working memory and one measuring verbal working memory). In the second study, we asked participants to complete the spatial and statistics anxiety measures as well as two other tasks (one measuring verbal abilities and one measuring spatial problem-solving skills) The results indicate that spatial skills are related to and predict interpretation anxiety in statistics. In order to examine the possibility of statistical cognition, one needs an instrument measuring statistics understanding. In order to develop such a test, one needs to know which statistical concepts it will evaluate. As such, Study C examines this prerequisite. A total of 42 statistics instructors were recruited to tell us which concepts were being measured in each item of four tests measuring statistics understanding. The analysis of their responses resulted in a list of 18 concepts. These studies indicate that spatial skills could be related to the understanding of statistics, which contributes to the foundation for a statistical cognition field of research.