Undergraduate Students’ Attitudes toward Statistics: How Excel Makes a Student’s Life Easier

ABSTRACT

Purpose

This study discusses how Excel program can improve attitudes toward statistics among undergraduate social work students in the context of experiential learning. According to the experiential learning approach, instructors can take diverse teaching techniques such as learning by doing, simulating, and participating in activities to maximize students’ learning. The researchers used Microsoft Excel as a statistical analysis software program to increase students’ engagement and participations in an undergraduate statistics course.

Method

The Students Attitude Toward Statistics was measured to compare students’ attitude toward Statistics course before and after the course.

Results

The findings of our pretest and posttest scores suggested that the use of the Excel program was following by a reduction in students’ anxiety.

Discussion

Due to the small sample size and other limitations of this study, the results should be interpreted with caution.

KEYWORDS:

• Experiential learning
• teaching statistics
• social work statistics course

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.