What Causes The Most Anxiety In An Introductory Statistics Course Interpretating, Asking For Help, Statistics Exams? A Rasch Analysis Of The Statistical Anxiety Scale

The purpose of this study is to examine the psychometric properties of the Statistical Anxiety Scale. While statistical anxiety and self-efficacy has been researched in the literature, the majority of this research has been performed on undergraduate, usually psychology, students. To contribute to the literature on statistical anxiety our study focuses on validating the scale with a unique population of community college students as well as developing an item hierarchy to understand what items are endorsed by the participants as causing them more anxiety. Data was collected in community college. Participants were enrolled in an introduction to statistics course (N = 108). The SAS is a 24-item measure was used to evaluate factors of statistical anxiety. Factors included (1) examination anxiety, (2) asking for help anxiety (3) interpretation anxiety. Participants responded on a 5-point Likert scale that had a range from 1 (no anxiety) to 5 (considerable anxiety). High scores in each of the three factors, indicated high levels of statistical anxiety. A principal component analysis was applied to the items and showed the three dimensions of the scale. The scores of the subscales all had good reliability. Rasch analyses revealed the items that caused the most anxiety for each of the three subscales were: fear of asking a private tutor for help, understanding the statistical analyses described in the abstract of a journal article, and realizing too late they cannot do the problems.