Study of Students’ Prior Statistical Knowledge and Attitude

As a requirement for graduation, Civil and Construction majors at University X must take a Probability and Statistics course in their Junior year. A background knowledge probe (pre-test) was developed based on key elementary statistical concepts. Questions on the pretest asked students to calculate descriptive statistics, simple probability, and to describe a histogram. The pre-test was administered at the beginning of the course to measure student's prior statistical knowledge and to identify student misconceptions at the beginning of the term. A survey of student attitudes (i.e., affect, cognitive, value, difficulty, interest, and effort) toward statistics was also administered at the beginning of the semester. This study examines the pre-test data and the survey of students' attitude toward statistics at University X.