Study suggests there is no ‘right’ way to teach statistics, giving flexibility to educators

A new study has investigated whether challenges faced by educators in teaching statistics could be reduced by changing how it is taught and revealed that there is no ‘right way,’ giving flexibility to educators to choose how best to teach the subject.

Students studying subjects ranging from psychology and medicine to law are often required to learn statistics, but many find the subject challenging. Two common difficulties are understanding statistical concepts and experiencing anxiety about statistics.

Experts from the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham have published a new study in Psychology Teaching Review that explored these challenges and whether changing the order in which people encounter equations and worked examples, and the type of example used, affected their learning. The findings suggest that the order and example type did not affect either statistics understanding or anxiety.  This means educators may have considerable flexibility in deciding how to introduce statistical concepts such as standard deviation.

Dr Kieran Lyon from the School of Psychology is lead author on the paper, he said: “We performed this study to find out whether changing the order of teaching materials and the examples used would reduce statistics anxiety and improve understanding.  Neither order or example type affected these outcomes.  This is good news, because it means that either order and example type is equally effective, and educations can choose without worrying that it will negatively affect students' experience or grades.”

Statistics is often introduced through lectures that present abstract equations before students practice applying them to example data. The researchers investigated whether putting the worked example first, or changing the example type, could make statistics easier to understand and less anxiety-provoking.

The researchers conducted an online experiment focused on standard deviation, a measure of how spread-out numbers are around their average. Participants learned the equation for standard deviation and completed a worked example involving calculating the standard deviation of a set of numbers using Microsoft Excel.

The study tested two different teaching orders: equation-first, where participants learned the equation before completing the worked example; and example-first, where participants completed the worked example before learning the equation.

The researchers also compared two types of worked example. One used real-world data on life expectancy from the United Nations, while the other used a deliberately fun and fictional scenario involving the heights of aliens from another planet.

The researchers found that neither the order in which the material was presented nor the type of example used affected participants’ understanding of statistics or their statistics anxiety.

Nikki Dean Marshall, Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology is co-author on the study and added: “Many students approach statistics with anxiety, so educators are always looking for ways to make the subject more accessible. Our findings suggest there is no single 'right' way to teach statistics. Whether teaching begins or ends with equations or whether examples are real-world or simulated, people appear to learn just as effectively which is great news as it gives educators the flexibility to adapt their teaching to the needs of their learners.”

---

Journal

Psychology Teaching Review

DOI

10.53841/bpsptr.2026.32.2.21 

Autistic children benefitted from online literacy instruction during COVID pandemic

 Despite many obstacles presented by students being at home during COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, the autistic children involved in this research project still showed significant progress through online instruction.

Flinders University’s Professor Joanne Arciuli, who led the feasibility study, says that developing useful tools for this area of literacy teaching plugs a gap in autistic care.

“Children with autism present with highly diverse and non-uniform reading profiles, with some experiencing difficulties with reading comprehension more than reading accuracy skills,” says Professor Arciuli.

She points to 2021 research of 26 studies involving more than 1200 autistic children, which showed that word reading scores were higher on average than reading comprehension scores.

While the feasibility study was originally designed to test the effects of small-group face-to-face literacy instruction on the reading skills of autistic children in an area of relative sociodemographic inequity, these plans changed due to stay-at-home orders issued mid-way through the study – from group-based to one-to-one instruction, and from in person to online delivery.

“It ended up being a steep learning curve to conduct a trial in an area of socioeconomic disadvantage in Western Sydney during a global pandemic,” says Professor Arciuli.

“The study continued because we had an ethical duty to continue providing services to research participants, so we moved instruction online via telepractice with the interactive web application ABRACADABRA – and this unexpected change offered a unique opportunity to explore the effects of literacy instruction under the same ‘real world’ conditions impacting clinical settings at the time.

“Autistic child participants in our two instruction groups did make some gains in reading abilities compared to a control group, which is interesting because of the mandated disruptions and complex personal and family issues experienced by our participants.”

The outcomes underline the value of a tool such as ABRACADABRA, a free online interactive web application with 33 activities, designed to support children's development in alphabetics (phonemic awareness and phonics), reading fluency, reading comprehension (vocabulary and comprehension strategies) and writing (spelling).

Developed in 2002 by the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, the modular ABRACADABRA program can provide highly individualised literacy instruction.

The outcomes produced a surprise. “We hypothesised initially that children in instruction conditions would achieve gains in their reading accuracy and reading comprehension skills, and that children participating in shared book reading activities would achieve greater gains in reading comprehension than children who did not participate in these. However, children who participated in the intervention conditions made significant gains compared with the control group.”

Professor Arciuli says the application of this research could have far-reaching benefits for telepractice delivery of literacy instruction, especially for children with autism in rural or remote areas who cannot access face-to-face instruction.

The research – “ABRACADABRA literacy instruction delivered by speech-language pathologists to children with autism during the COVID-19 pandemic”, by Annemarie Murphy, Benjamin Bailey, Robert Savage, Rauno Parrila and Joanne Arciuli – has been published in the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. DOI:10.1080/17549507.2025.2555990.

Online communication with different types of friends affects teens’ mental well-being

 In a study in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, researchers found that online communication with friends was associated with adolescents’ mental well-being, but patterns varied by both frequency of communication and the type of friendship.

For the study, investigators analyzed responses from 3,034 15-year-olds participating in the 2017/2018 and 2021/2022 Swedish Health Behaviour in School-aged Children surveys.

Intense online communication with close friends and larger groups was associated with better mental well-being. Moderate or intense communication with online-only friends was linked with poorer well-being, particularly among girls and adolescents who perceived their families as less wealthy.

“Amid growing concern about young people’s online lives, our findings suggest that it is not only how much adolescents communicate online that matters, but also who they communicate with,” said corresponding author Associate Professor Viviane S. Straatmann, PhD, of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University, in Sweden. “This highlights the importance of considering the social context of online interactions when discussing their implications for adolescent well-being.”

URL upon publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/camh.70139

Anxiety over climate change affects college students

 

College undergraduates are anxious about climate change, with many feeling powerless and frustrated about Earth’s future, yet resources to help students cope are in short supply, according to new interdisciplinary University of Utah research. The sentiment isn’t limited to students studying the environment.

“They’re not alone,” said Jennifer Follstad Shah, associate professor in the university’s School of Environment, Society & Sustainability. “There’s a lot of students feeling that way, and likely a lot of adults feeling that way.” Her findings appear in the journal Sustainability.

The research led by Follstad Shah and other Utah faculty surveyed 547 University of Utah students about their emotional responses to climate change and the factors that influenced their feelings. More than half reported frequently feeling powerless or frustrated.

The team released a companion study last year based on the same survey data investigating ways students cope with climate anxiety. Led by Monika Lohani, associate professor of psychology, this study found that students found relief by spending time in nature, hanging out with friends and spending time with pets, engaging in self-care, changing their behavior to lessen their climate impact and learning more about climate change.

“The knowledge is empowering them to understand the intricacies. That makes them not feel hopeless,” said Lohani, a research associate with the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU). “All the progress in terms of technology that has come out to combat the carbon footprint actually made them feel more hopeful.”

Both studies argue that universities should expand support services to help students manage the emotional burdens associated with potentially destructive environmental change driven by reliance on fossil fuels.

Drivers of climate anxiety

Researchers surveyed students enrolled in three environmental studies courses and one communication course.

Students rated how often climate change made them feel certain emotions. In the study led by Follstad Shah, powerlessness and frustration were the most reported, with 54% of students reporting that they felt powerless frequently or a lot, and 55% said the same about frustration.

Just 4% of students said they felt hopeful “A lot,” though 40% reported at least some hope when other response categories were counted. Students who reported more general anxiety also tended to experience greater anxiety over climate. The researchers cautioned that the findings do not establish causal connections between climate change and anxiety.

“It may be that climate anxiety is a contributor to general anxiety, as well as the converse,” Follstad Shah said.

Students majoring in environmental studies reported higher climate anxiety than other students, even when they had similar levels of general anxiety. However, a student’s major was not a significant predictor once the researchers considered other factors, such as how often students encountered climate information, whether they considered climate change a personal issue and their political views.

Students who identified climate change as a top personal concern and who held more liberal political views tended to report greater levels of climate anxiety. Exposure to climate change information in class and online was also associated with anxiety, while information from friends, family and co-workers was not.

Lohani’s paper documented “adaptive” and “maladaptive” responses students have to the climate crisis. Some students said worry over climate made them shut down. One wrote, “Sometimes I just don’t feel like doing anything at all because it makes me so anxious.”

“People, often a majority, don’t know what to do with it,” Lohani said. “That is problematic for many reasons. Those who are overwhelmed, they might be catastrophizing or using avoidance or distraction, which ultimately is not good for their well-being, or efforts to address the climate change crisis. Those who are apathetic towards it, that is not bad for their well-being in the short run, but ultimately it is affecting them and their community.”

Supporting students burdened with climate anxiety

Follstad Shah and Lohani argued universities should expand mental health resources to address climate anxiety more directly.

Surveyed students told researchers that they want more opportunities to discuss climate change with peers and mentors. Follstad Shah and Lohani both highlighted the Good Grief Network, co-founded by LaUra Schmidt, a 2014 graduate of Utah’s Environmental Humanities program. This nonprofit harnesses peer support to help people and communities experiencing distress from social and ecological injustices.

The researchers encouraged students to get involved by asking faculty about climate research or internships. Students said they cope with anxiety by volunteering with advocacy groups. “Take part in environmentally friendly activities. Participate in community clean-up activities, volunteer for environmental issues, and join local projects,” said one student cited in Lohani’s paper.

Such experiences help students gain a sense of agency, according to the researchers. “Don’t be afraid to talk about it and let people know that you feel this way,” Follstad Shah said. “There’s power in those bonds.”

The researchers note that these findings represent just a snapshot in time and a specific undergraduate experience at a major university in an arid Western state where climate impacts are very noticeable. About 66% of respondents were female, 69% were White and 63% leaned left politically. The authors recommend follow-up studies that include students across more academic majors, backgrounds and universities to better understand the drivers of climate anxiety and how to help students manage it.

#####

The more recent study appeared Aug. 5 in the journal Sustainability under the title “Climate Anxiety Among Undergraduates at an R1 University in the United States.” I

Faculty Productivity Among Affirmative Action Hires

 Affirmative action programs are often criticized because of concerns that they result in lower worker productivity and efficiency losses. This study evaluates the relative productivity of workers benefiting from an aggressive affirmative action policy in a setting where hiring constraints are mandated upon employers and are typically likely to bind. 

In India, colleges are required to reserve approximately 50 percent of faculty hires for individuals from disadvantaged caste and social class groups. The authors collect and analyze data from a nationally representative sample of 50 engineering and technology colleges in India, some of which randomly assign students to classrooms. 

The authors find that reservation category faculty have lower levels of education, lower professorial ranks and fewer years of experience in academia than general category faculty who are not hired through reservations. Yet, even with lower qualifications, they do not detect meaningful differences in instructional quality between reservation category faculty and general category faculty across a wide range of measures that include course grades, follow-on course grades, standardized test scores, dropout, attendance, graduate school plans, and graduation. 

In fact, at least for immediate effects on course grades, students taught by reservation category faculty perform slightly better than students taught by general category faculty. 

They also estimate “teacher-like-me” effects of reservation category faculty on the relative course performance and longer-term outcomes of reservation category students and cannot reject the hypothesis of null effects. 

Furthermore, even in the face of potential discrimination and resentment against faculty hiring quotas, general category students perform slightly better in classrooms taught by reservation category faculty than general category faculty. 

Finally, estimates of differences between reservation category and general category faculty in several measures of research productivity and administrative service are small in magnitude and not statistically different from zero. 

The findings have implications for the heated debates over affirmative action programs found in many countries around the world and in India which is now the largest country in the world.

Home Visits Can Re-Engage Chronically Absent Students

 Beginning in the summer of 2021, the state of Connecticut launched the Learner Engagement and Attendance Program (LEAP) where home visits by school personnel were conducted with students identified as chronically absent from Connecticut’s 15 most disadvantaged school districts. Home visits were designed to connect students and their families directly with teachers to foster strong connections. 

This study uses student-level data from 2021–22 through 2023-24 to estimate event studies of the effect of LEAP on student attendance, chronic absenteeism, disciplinary incidents, and student achievement. Utilizing models that address selection into treatment timing over student observable and unobservable attributes, the authors find that students who received the LEAP intervention experienced approximately a 4 to 5 percentage point increase in attendance rates, a 13 to 15 percentage point decline in chronic absenteeism, and a 3 to 5 percentage point decline in the number of disciplinary incidents. 

Notably, initial event studies indicated increasing treatment effects over time, but after correcting for selection on unobservables treatment effects appeared constant over time. 

These effects were broad based, with similar impacts by gender, race and ethnicity, and free or reduced-price lunch status. These attendance and discipline results provide suggest that the LEAP intervention increased student noncognitive skills.

Self-Censorship on College Campuses

 There has been widespread concern about self-censorship on university campuses, and especially that conservative voices are being stifled. Using survey data from a private elite college, this study shows that self-censorship is not simply about being conservative: it is students with the most moderate views who self-censor the most. This pattern is associated with confidence and salience — students who are more confident in their views or who see an issue as especially important tend to hold more extreme views and to self-censor less. 

At the same time, conservatives self-censor at higher rates than liberals, and the same individual is more likely to self-censor on the views where they are relatively more conservative than on those where they are relatively more liberal; conservatives are also far more likely than liberals to cite concerns about social exclusion as a reason for self-censoring, and report self-censoring less outside the university community. Groups perceived as marginalized self-censor less than majority groups, and especially so on issues salient to them (e.g., Black students on BLM).