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  • Confidence disparities: Pre-course coding confidence predicts greater statistics intentions and perceived achievement in a project-based introductory statistics course.
Title: Confidence disparities: Pre-course coding confidence predicts greater statistics intentions and perceived achievement in a project-based introductory statistics course.
Self-efficacy is associated with a range of educational outcomes, including science and math degree attainment. Project-based statistics courses have the potential to increase students’ math self-efficacy because projects may represent a mastery experience, but students enter courses with preexisting math self-efficacy. This study explored associations between pre-course math confidence and coding confidence with post course statistical intentions and perceived achievement among students in a project-based statistics course at 28 private and public colleges and universities between fall 2018 and winter 2020 (n=801) using multilevel mixed-effects multivariate linear regression within multiply imputed data with a cross-validation approach (testing n=508 at 20 colleges/universities). We found that pre-course coding confidence was associated with, respectively, 9 points greater post-course statistical intentions and 10 points greater perceived achievement on a scale 0–100 (0.09, 95% confidence interval (0.02, 0.17), p=0.02; 0.10, 95% CI (0.01, 0.19), p=0.04), and that minoritized students have greater post-course statistical intentions than non-minoritized students. These results concur with past research showing the potential effectiveness of the project-based approach for increasing the interest of minoritized students in statistics. Pre-course interventions to increase coding confidence such as pre-college coding experiences may improve students’ post-course motivations and perceived achievement in a project-based course. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1820766
PAR ID:
10426469
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of statistics and data science education
ISSN:
2693-9169
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1-13
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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