Have you ever thought about how your students’ attitudes might relate to their learning?
Help us find out!
You probably received a similar email from us in October recruiting for Fall 2021 S-SOMAS
survey administration. We are now recruiting for Spring 2022. You are welcome to sign up
now if you like to get your full Spring schedule set up before Spring starts. We will also
be sending another sign-up email in February 2022 for those who would like to wait to sign
up. The deadline for sign-ups is March 1, and we will be asking you to administer the
survey in March or April 2022.
We have identified you as an instructor of statistics and/or data science who is invested
in your students. We hope that you are willing to join
us<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfqCyC4ZI1pOMnoOrrZ_MdquBNoS…
as we strive to understand the role that student attitudes play in the learning process.
We are a team of researchers working on a
project<https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2013392&His…
funded by the National Science Foundation (DUE-2013392) to develop validated instruments
measuring student and instructor attitudes toward statistics and data science. We refer to
this project as MASDER (Motivational Attitudes in Statistics and Data Science Education
Research). These instruments will allow us to understand how student attitudes toward
statistics relate to course grades and conceptual understanding, as well as to instructor
attitudes, pedagogical modalities, and course and university characteristics. We hope you
will agree to participate in this important work.
We are looking for instructors who are willing to give students in their undergraduate
statistics courses our pilot Student Survey of Motivational Attitudes toward Statistics
(S-SOMAS) during the Spring 2022 semester. (This survey will be slightly modified compared
to the Fall 2021 version based on our psychometric analyses.) We will make this as easy as
possible for you by providing an individualized link for administering this survey to your
class. It should only take students about 10-15 minutes to complete.
This project has been approved by our Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB has also
set forth some guidelines that we must follow in conducting this research, which we
describe herein. Please note that due to our IRB approval and scope of grant, we are only
recruiting courses taught in the United States. The survey should be assigned either for
class credit or for extra credit in order to increase the response rates. We will share
with you a list of students who completed the consent form, but we are unable to reveal
additional student information or survey responses. Your involvement in this project
improves the quality of the final survey which we will develop. Amalgamated, de-identified
survey data will be publicly available at the end of the grant period, as well as
additional material. If you would like to connect with your IRB before administering the
survey, you may provide them with this
folder<https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1V4o0R0du_vPt6ZPWx8tlZx1HN…
that includes information they might need to determine your eligibility to administer the
survey.
If you are interested in participating, please fill out this short
survey<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfqCyC4ZI1pOMnoOrrZ_Mdqu…
by March 1st, 2022. This short survey should be completed for each course you plan to
administer the S-SOMAS to. You do not need to complete the survey multiple times for each
section within a course. We would like your students to complete the S-SOMAS survey in
March or April 2022. We also encourage you to share this email with colleagues who might
be interested.
Also, be on the lookout for an email from us in January asking you to fill out our pilot
I-SOMAS instrument (Instructor Survey of Motivational Attitudes toward Teaching
Statistics). We are excited to be developing this new survey for better understanding
statistics educators!
We thank you in advance for your help!
Alana Unfried (PI), California State University - Monterey Bay
Leyla Batakci, Elizabethtown College
Wendine Bolon, Monmouth College
Marjorie Bond, Monmouth College
April Kerby-Helm, Winona State University
Michael Posner, Villanova University
Douglas Whitaker, Mount Saint Vincent University