Math anxiety, defined as feelings of apprehension and fear of courses involving mathematics, often interferes with student learning in a variety of college-level courses. A related phenomenon, statistics anxiety, affects the performance of many students in statistics courses. Researchers have found evidence that including collaborative problem solving as an instructional methodology is effective at reducing the negative effects of statistics anxiety. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore adult perceptions of collaborative problem solving as an instructional methodology focused on improving the learning environment in a business statistics course. Behaviorist, constructivist, and adult learning theories provided the foundation for this study that gathered narrative interview data from 14 adult students. The narratives were analyzed by first coding responses to questions into 7 frames of reference. Further refining of the data was accomplished by grouping responses in each frame of reference into common realms of response. Findings indicated that the adult participants perceived collaboration to be effective at reducing stress levels and improving course performance. Additionally, the participants identified weekly learning tasks, collaborative partner selection methods, and student resource materials that could benefit from redesigning. The project that stemmed from this research involved restructuring the instructional methodologies, learning tasks, and student resources to better align with adult learning preferences identified by the participants. The benefits to positive social change resulting from this project study included improving the course learning environment for adults and identifying adult preferences for implementing collaboration as a learning methodology.

The aim of this study was to validate an instrument that can be used by instructors or social scientist who are interested in evaluating statistics anxiety. The psychometric properties of the English version of the Statistical Anxiety Scale (SAS) was examined through a confirmatory factor analysis of scores from a sample of 323 undergraduate social science majors enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States. In previous studies, the psychometric properties of the Spanish and Italian versions of the SAS were validated; however, the English version of the SAS had never been assessed. Inconsistent with previous studies, scores on the English version of the SAS did not produce psychometrically acceptable values of validity. However, the results of this study suggested the potential value of a revised two-factor model SAS to measure statistics anxiety. Additionally, the Attitudes Towards Statistics (ATS) scale was used to examine the convergent and discriminant validities of the two-factor SAS. As expected, the correlation between the two factors of the SAS and the two factors of the ATS uncovered a moderately negative correlation between examination anxiety and attitudes towards the course. Additionally, the results of a structural regression model of attitudes towards statistics as a predictor of statistics anxiety suggested that attitudes towards the course and attitudes towards the field of statistics moderately predicts examination anxiety with attitudes towards the course having the greatest influence. It is recommended that future studies examine the relationship between attitudes towards statistics, statistics anxiety, and other variables such as academic achievement and instructional style.