Construct validation of students’ anxiety and attitudes towards statistical concepts questionnaire: An exploratory factor analysis procedure

This research aims to discover and establish a reliable instrument with respect to measuring students’ anxiety and attitude in statistics courses through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) by including 27 items for anxiety construct and 38 items for attitude construct. Prior to that, a pilot study was implemented with 100 randomly appointed students, in which all items were initially validated by experts. They were registered in basic statistics courses and came from four distinct diploma programmes. IBM-SPSS version 23.0 was employed by the researchers to perform an EFA technique on construct elements via an extraction method with respect to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) having varimax rotation. Moreover, for each construct, the relevant sample size with respect to analysis was determined via the Bartletts’ Test of Sphericity as well as the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure of Sampling Adequacy. All item measures were also assessed for reliability using Cronbach's alpha. The Bartletts’ Test of Sphericity is very substantial (p-value0.8), according to the findings. The Cronbach's alpha values with respect to every component are all higher than 0.7. This shows that the questionnaire's entire set of questions may be used to reliably students’ anxiety as well as attitudes about statistical concepts. The study's findings not only revealed more useful metrics for measuring students’ anxiety and attitudes regarding statistical concepts, but they also will be useful information which can be served as a reference among academicians to expand the execution of statistics in the higher education system and enhance the student's potential in statistics courses.