The influence of students’ numeracy skills on the attainment of course learning outcome in introductory statistics course

Teaching a statistics course has been a challenge to lecturer when students come from different level of knowledge and skills. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the level of students’ numeracy skills has an effect to the attainment of Course Learning Outcome in Elementary Statistics Course at higher learning institution. The sample comprised of 110 Elementary Statistics students in one of the public universities in Malaysia. Initially, students were required to take a competency test in numeracy skill. From the results, students then being classified into two groups, namely the analytics and non-analytics students. The Statistical Wilcoxon Rank Sum test then used to investigate the difference of students’ groups on the attainment of CLO’s score. The result shows that there is not much difference between analytics and non-analytics groups on lower level of CLOs or the attainment of knowledge and comprehension (CLO1 and CLO2). However, the findings suggest that there is a significant difference between these two types of student in higher level of CLOs or the attainment of application and analysis (CLO3 and CLO4), which require students to describe and solve a statistical problem.