By Kiran Ravichandran (College of Wooster)
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Upon research, University of Iowa professor emeritus of statistics Robert Hogg claimed that "students frequently view statistics as the worst course taken in college." I seek to delve into this claim by considering various factors that influence students' motivation and success in college statistics courses. I use a recently developed set of items from a survey already given to the University of Colorado's (UNC) 54 intro-level statistics students, implementing the survey on the College of Wooster's 46 200-level statistics students and comparing data findings between the two cohorts. The survey contains items that can be grouped into the components course anxiousness, attitude toward statistics, perceived course difficulty, perception of the course professor, level of interest in statistics, and pre-college statistics exposure, each of which I consider to be motivation measures. I find that UNC students had a surprising negative correlation between attitude and perceived difficulty, possibly signaling overconfidence among those disliking stats, while Wooster's students had a weak positive correlation. Linear regression shows that professor ratings are largely unaffected by course anxiousness, statistics attitudes, and perceived difficulty in both classes, but the other component scores more strongly influence each other. Ordinal logistic regression reveals that course anxiousness strongly predicts exam grades in both classes ($p < 0.05$ for both), while all other factors are somewhat or much weaker at predicting exam grades. Cronbach's alpha analysis shows that UNC's components generally showed stronger internal consistency than Wooster's, despite strong item associations for the Anxiety, Attitude, and Professor components in both datasets.