Gender-age effects in assessing attitudes toward statistics among undergraduate students: structural equation approach

Abstract

Students’ ability to be abreast with the basic concepts in statistics and its applications would help to stay relevant in the modern world due to the dynamic ways of doing things currently. The aims of the study were to assess the psychometric properties of the SATS in the Ghanaian context, to explore attitudes influencing factors and the relationship between psychometric properties of SATS and to examine gender-age effects in assessing statistical literacy among students. In this research the study was conducted to acquire a valid instrument to measure attitudes toward statistics in the Ghanaian context. The study surveyed 1000 undergraduate students from 10 universities. In this study, structural equation modeling through confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the six-factor structure of the SATS scale and resulted in good model fit indices. A multi-group analysis was performed, which suggests gender and age have significant influence on some of the psychometric properties of the SATS components.

Keywords:

• Student
• Sstatistics literacy
• reliability
• confirmatory factor analysis
• attitude

Acknowledgments

We thank the management of the ten (10) universities and field workers who helped us in the gathering of the data for the study.