TPC-Digests-V1-Issues-123

social support indicating the importance of graduate students’ belief in their competence of facing the challenges of learning statistics. However, there was no change in the relationship when social support was removed from the analysis. Thus, social support was not a contributing variable, and it may possibly help one cope but not necessarily remove the problem, change attitudes, or change thinking. There was a negative correlation between self-efficacy and anxiety, which seemed to depict a self-fulfilling prophecy that graduate students assume when faced with taking statistics courses (Perney & Ravid, 1991). A positive correlation was found between self- efficacy to learn statistics and attitudes towards statistics. Results indicated a more moderate response to attitudes not found in other studies where students were coming in with a negative attitude or were developing negative attitudes towards the end of the course (Gal & Gingsburg, 1994). Participants reported a high level of social support, which indicates that most of the graduate students believed they had adequate support. Multicollinearity between statistics anxiety and attitude toward statistics suggests an interrelationship between the two variables (Gall et al., 2007). Both variables may be measuring the relatively same characteristic; thus, neither variable may have brought something completely new to the analysis. The authors examined the extent of the relationship between self-efficacy to learn statistics and statistics anxiety, attitude towards statistics, and social support of graduate students enrolled in programs within colleges of education. Insight into how this population response to statistics courses and implications for educators as well as students are presented. There was a negative correlation between self-efficacy and anxiety TPC Digest