Overcoming statistics anxiety among psychology learners

Teaching statistics for psychology can be challenging for all stakeholders involved. From a student perspective, engaging with statistics can be a shock; after all, most individual's key inspiration for embarking on a degree in psychology may not have been to learn about the normal distribution and data visualisation. From an educator's perspective, facilitating learning in engaging, inclusive ways that productively connect to the broader psychology degree can be challenging.

Here we present our top principles, clustered across three areas, for successfully facilitating learning. We are seven educators based at London Metropolitan University who are delivering statistics for psychology workshops in the current academic year. We are a diverse team of Success Coach educators (i.e., current/ recent psychology students) and lecturer educators who, through our community of practise dialogue, wanted to better understand how to support our learners.  

We hope that the principles below are helpful for educators in our diverse sector to support our brilliant and inspirational learners to understand and engage in statistics for psychology during undergraduate studies.  

Think about… session structure, environment, and resources.

1. Strike a balance between walk-throughs and independent tasks. Provide SPSS package 'walk-throughs' before leading on to independent work sheet activities and tie things together with a final plenary to go through tasks together as a class.
2. Use multimedia resources to deliver differentiated learning environments. Use multimedia (e.g., brief videos) to deliver key SPSS command processes and stop where further explanation may be helpful.
3. Leverage available and relevant resources. For example, provide a curated list of freely available SPSS/ statistics tutorials; books for more advanced students).
4. Marshalling the physical space. Move around the learning space to speak with learners sitting at the back who are harder to reach and who otherwise remain quiet during most of the session.
5. Keep energy levels going and take breaks! Energy levels can be low, especially later in the day, so pace your sessions, take 10–15-minute breaks and signpost where these will be during the session.

Think about… teaching principles and effective dynamics.

1. Adopting an inclusive teaching approach. Cater for the diverse learning styles in your group by offering different approaches for learners working at different speeds. For example, having tasks handy to extend and challenge more confident learners and building in 1-to-1 support for less confident students will help achieve a more inclusive environment.
2. Drawing on a diverse educator team. Working as a team of permanent lecturing staff and Success Coaches (i.e., current/ recent psychology students), or similar differentiated approach to the educator team, can mean that more educators are available but also means that learners have someone potentially more relatable teaching them bridging the student vs teacher gap.
3. Foster communities of practice. Encourage more confident students to support other students to help build a community of practice around statistics for psychology. Encourage these groups to extend beyond the learning occasion – e.g., in study groups and ongoing conversations and supportive networks.
4. Embedding a patient, compassionate teaching approach. Choosing words that are kind, non-judgemental and using intonation and conveys a compassionate teaching approach is important. Choose moments to show that you care about the learning experience; for example, communicating that statistics for psychology and SPSS are new things for most in the room and that no-one needs to feel that they must understand everything immediately.
5. Provide positive reinforcement to acknowledge desired outcomes. Communicate to learners that they are doing well to foster a positive, supportive and kind classroom culture.
6. Consider disclosing personal challenges with learning statistics for psychology. Bring your own personal difficulties and anxieties with statistics to foster a climate where conversation and questions are encouraged. Build bridges of experience between learners and educators.
7. Cultivate a fun, collegiate, humorous workshop atmosphere. Learning by doing and not always getting it right can help inoculate against anxiety and destigmatize statistics for psychology. Build a fun, collegiate learning environment where students look forward to their journey together.

Think about… how to approach the teaching of statistics for psychology.

1. Use constructive alignment in your teaching approach. Aim to link statistics in its relevance to psychology as a discipline by, for example, explaining how 'mean scores' can provide an initial indicator of between 'treatment' and 'control' groups for a clinical psychology intervention. Discover what areas of psychology interest learners and show how SPSS directly relates to their topic of interest. Align their research module studies (the part) to the broader course, the broader discipline, and/ or the planned-for professional career (the whole).
2. Talking about anxiety within the educational approach. Educators needs to take statistics anxiety seriously – it may stem from mathematics anxiety from school days many years ago or more recently from myths passed through horror stories from discussing statistics classes with previous psychology students. This can helpfully 'call out' the feeling in the room. Consider using live polling technology (e.g., Mentimeter) for learners to anonymously acknowledge terror of statistics and build an understanding that we're all in the same boat together.
3. Emphasising statistical package practice within 'safe' workshop spaces. Creating an environment where learners understand that they need to practice and familiarize themselves with SPSS can be helpful to consistently underscore and revisit.
4. Overcoming technology-related challenges. Students hold different prior levels of understanding around basic IT skills, i.e., just navigating around a computer. Making no assumptions here, as an educator, is therefore important to maintain an inclusive approach to statistics workshops.