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Reducing social work students' statistics anxiety.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This paper focused on how various teaching methods reduced anxiety in social work students (N=13) taking a statistics course. The methods included SPSS assignments, student presentations, in-class demonstrations, and readings. In general, students believed that their anxiety was reduced. Conclusions drawn focused on how the teaching methods might have reduced anxiety.

Reducing Social Work Students' Statistics Anxiety

The need to have a baseline understanding of statistics is extremely important for the social work professional. Comprehension of statistical methods will give the student the opportunity to understand previous and current research, generate their own research, evaluate practice, and draw informed conclusions about their clients. However, if a group of social work professors was sitting around the coffee table and the discussion turned to teaching statistics, there would probably be universal agreement that students have high levels of anxiety about statistics based courses. Unfortunately, only a small and inconsistent body of research exists that demonstrates the belief that statistics courses provoke anxiety in social work majors, thus making research into the anxiety of the students an important topic of study.

Research has demonstrated that undergraduate social work majors report higher levels of math anxiety than other social science majors (Royse and Rompf, 1992). Similarly, in a sample of 132 undergraduate social work students, Gustavsson and MacEachron (2001) report that even prior to enrolling in a statistics course, a moderate level of mathematics anxiety existed. Davis (2003) found that 38 out of 41 African-American females enrolled in a graduate social work statistics course demonstrated moderate to high levels of anxiety about the subject matter at the beginning of the course.

Given the aforementioned research, and the idea that social work students are prone to anxiety, social work professors are often challenged with ways to deliver the content while reducing the student's anxiety of learning statistical methods. An example comes from Forte (1995), who describes a social science statistics course that was designed to reduce anxiety in the student. Forte used computer assisted instruction in the form of teaching about statistical software packages, homework assignments based on these lessons, assignments where students practiced speaking in statistical lingo, cooperative learning exercises where students worked in small groups to further understand the concepts, and humor about statistics. In a survey of 93 undergraduate students (18% of them social work students) Forte (1995) found that anxiety decreased from the beginning to the end of the semester. However, there were no numerical offerings of the claimed decrease. Another example comes from Davis (2003), who...

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