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 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 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 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 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