Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Concerns abound about the quality of learning in statistics, globally and in South Africa, where issues of disciplinary difficulty may be compounded by students’ unpreparedness, linked to poor schooling. While the discipline of statistics has been subject to teaching and learning reforms on a global scale, introductory statistics educators appear to continue to teach content in traditional ways, while consistently expressing concern about the outcomes. This study explores a qualitative understanding of how students learn in statistics, of the experiences and processes involved, and how learning may be supported in this context whilst adopting the theory of threshold concepts as a framework to yield insights beyond quantitative success factors. A tutorial programme was designed and informed by successful disciplinary pedagogy which conformed to a threshold concepts orientation. Interactive qualitative analysis was employed as the methodological frame. This aligns with the social constructivist orientation of the threshold concepts framework, which defines the essential features of threshold concepts from the learners’ perspective. The study reveals that effective learning is a strongly affective, transformative process, requiring reflection and the ability to apply disciplinary ideas to relatable real-world contexts. These findings are broadly consistent with the threshold concepts framework, highlighting that learning has strongly affective aspects entwined with the cognitive; that it might entail periods of stuckness and liminality; that particular concepts are likely to be both troublesome and — once mastered — transformative; and that disciplinary learning has implications for students’ worldview and identity.