Reducing statistics anxiety of educational statistics course by opening resource and task-based learning instruction

Statistics is an important subject in the social science field, especially in education and psychology; however, as has been pointed out in previous literature, most students have feelings of anxiety about statistics courses. If students’ statistics anxiety could be reduced, this may help them perform better on statistics courses. The main purpose of this research project is to test whether a teaching strategy that uses open educational resources (OERs) and software and task-based learning can reduce statistics anxiety among students and increase their interest in statistics and their likelihood to continue learning in the future. The main body of research for this project will come from classes taught by the author over two semesters. It will use a mixed-method research approach to measure statistical anxiety, statistical interest, and learning tendency among students in the two classes at the beginning and end of each course. Semi-structured interviews will be used to gather students’ thoughts about the course and find out what gains they make. This study uses a quasi-experimental method to employ different teaching methods in the two courses: the control group receives the author’s original teaching strategies, while the experimental group uses additional OERs and task-based learning. In the latter, there is less literature and more hands-on statistical tasks that students need to learn in order to complete the task. It is expected that this study will show that a change in teaching strategy helps achieve the goal of “less teaching, more learning,” but that more importantly students really do experience reduced statistics anxiety and are willing to keep using statistics after taking the course. This is a long-term plan for cultivating talent.