Alyssa Counsell
Dr. Alyssa Counsell is an Associate Professor in the Psychology department and Director of the Psychology and Statistics Education Research (PASER) Lab. Dr. Counsell is primarily interested in the scholarship of learning and teaching, especially as it pertains to statistics education. She studies topics such as statistics anxiety, attitudes toward statistics and statistical software, and statistics literacy. She also works to identify statistical challenges for applied researchers and explore ways to better emphasize research transparency and open science practices.
Dr. Counsell has won several teaching awards and has been the recipient of over $250,000 from SSHRC to lead several research projects aimed at improving statistics education in the social sciences.
How can different pedagogical approaches support student success and mental health in statistics courses?
Statistics courses are notoriously unpopular in psychology. Research demonstrates that undergraduate psychology students tend to hold negative attitudes toward statistics and high levels of statistics anxiety. However, limited research directly examines students' experiences in these courses.
In this research project, I will employ a mixed methods approach to examine students' experiences after taking introductory level psychology statistics courses. Specifically, I will recruit students taking one of two different styles of psychology statistics (one that focuses more on hand calculations and another that focuses more on software). With this sample, I will use pre-post surveys to examine quantitative change in statistics attitudes and anxiety over the duration of their course. Next, I will conduct interviews to examine qualitative data on the student experience in their statistics course.
As Psychology is in the process of revamping our statistics and methods courses at the undergraduate level, these data will provide valuable information about where we can make changes to best support student learning and mental health in statistics courses.