Resumo

VENDRAMINI, Claudette Maria Medeiros  e  BRITO, Márcia Regina Ferreira de. Relationship among the attitude, concept and usefulness of the statistics. Psicol. esc. educ. [online]. 2001, vol.5, n.1, pp.59-73. ISSN 1413-8557.

Researches have indicated students’ negative attitudes towards Statistics and difficulties to learn it. Thus, this paper analyzes the relationships between the attitudes towards Statistics, its concept and its usefulness for 319 university students who answered an informative questionnaire and a scale of attitudes towards Statistics. This scale shows a high internal consistence. The few subjects who were able to define Statistics did not present any differences in attitudes as compared to those who were not able to define it. The majority of the students who considered Statistics a useful tool revealed more positive attitudes than those ones who did not consider it useful. These results suggest that teaching strategies that reveal the usefulness of Statistics should be adopted to allow students to develop more positive attitudes, and, thus, improve its teaching-learning process.

Palavras-chave : Attitude towards Statistics; Teaching-learning Statistics; Higher education.