Learning practices, perceived ability and learning outcomes in selected statistical concepts

Statistical education researchers have attempted to investigate the affective factors that relates to students´ learning outcomes in statistics. One pressing issue is how to continuously improve the teaching and learning of statistics at the tertiary level. Despite great emphasis on the importance of statistics, students are still facing difficulty in learning statistics. In this study, an attempt was made to investigate the causal relationship between the latent variables namely, students´ learning practices, perceived ability in selected statistical concepts and learning outcomes using a structural or path model. The results showed that learning practices does not necessarily affect students´ perceived ability in understanding certain statistical concepts. It does not also necessarily lead to increase in students´ learning as demonstrated in their test performance. However, students´ perceived ability tend to be strongly related to students´ test performance regardless of the learning practices. At this juncture, the outcome of the study is not extremely surprising as there are other pertinent variables which could be considered in future investigations.