Why statistics is difficult to teach: A few considerations
Statistics is a content matter notoriously difficult to teach to students of the social sciences. Statistical anxiety, a well-documented form of anxiety, is present from the beginning of the course and explains in part the learning difficulties experienced by these students. However, we believe that statistics anxiety is a consequence and not the source of these difficulties. To initiate a discussion on how statistical teaching could be improved in the social sciences, we consider herein three causes that might explain that anxiety. To initiate a discussion which could lead to improvements in the way statistics is taught, we examine herein three possible causes of this anxiety. First, human beings have very limited intuitions of randomness (as can be seen from erroneous conceptions from compulsive players) and consequently, distributions and sampling remains opaque concepts for many. Second, some statistical concepts are truly “meta-statistical” concepts in which one must conceive of statistics onto statistics. Finally, procedures for decision taking in contexts where information is limited and inaccurate are often poorly understood. In this text, we detail these three conceptual difficulties and propose recommendations to weaken their consequences. The propositions presented here still need to be validated with formal studies; this text hope to be a catalyst of discussions aiming at improving the teaching of quantitative methods and statistics.