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Do Gender Plays A Role On Statistics Anxiety And / Or Attitude Towards Statistics

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Introduction
In previous research, a substantial emphasis has been placed on the necessity of statistical understanding in today’s intellectual, as well as common community (Wallman, 1993). Due to this, there has been a recent increase in the number of statistics courses, made mandatory at a university level (Gould, 2010). Unfortunately, as Statistics is often received badly, an extensive collection of research has been created on statistical anxiety/attitude (Cruise, Cash & Bolton, 1985). With the goal of building on this knowledge, the aim of this study is to determine if gender plays a role on Statistics anxiety and/or attitude towards statistics.

Statistics anxiety is understood “as the feelings of anxiety encountered when taking a statistics course, or doing statistical analysis” (Cruise, Cash & Bolton 1985). As such it is closely related to, but separate from mathematical anxiety, making the results found about gender differences in mathematical anxiety ungeneralizable, due to literacy and mathematical intelligence both having an effect on attitude as well as statistics anxiety (Amy, Kayleigh, Dénes, & Ann, 2012; Lalonde & Gardner, 1993).

It has been shown that although attitude and anxiety are two separate things, a lack of distinction between them within the scientific community, has led the two terms to be almost interchangeable (Nasser, 2004). Even when a clear distinction between anxiety and attitude is made, different groups of researchers have opposing

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