Statistics Skills Mastery: Scaling and Refining StatsSkills

About this initiative

Statistics anxiety has been widely researched and identified as a concern for both graduate and undergraduate students. A deliberate practice approach could address the overwhelming nature of learning statistics skills as it focuses only on one specific aspect of the performance at any one time. This project will build on StatSkills, an accessible, open-access web-app through which learners systematically build statistics skills. StatsSkills contains exercises targeting specific skills, on which learners receive immediate, automated feedback, and through which they can track their progress to master specific areas and so increase their self-efficacy (if they could master one particular skill, they could master the other ones too, one at a time). The initial version was piloted with a class of 93 students this semester, and we plan to pilot it with a second module next semester. Nearly 500 questions were written and the ability to include images was added (essential for integrating charts). StatsSkills can be seen in action in this introductory video and this follow up video. The initial version received largely positive feedback from learners. We presented an overview of the results in DEC23 (Ó Broin, D. et al). This follow-up project aims to scale the project so that it can help many more learners across different disciplines and campuses.