TPC-Journal-V1-Issue2

106 The Professional Counselor \ Volume 1, Issue 2 of attitudes throughout their graduate study tenure. Experimental designs to assess classroom and counseling based intervention effectiveness in reducing anxiety and improving attitudes should be conducted to improve the reliability of students learning statistics and influence the participation of conducting their own research for the betterment of the counseling profession. Finally, qualitative studies need to be conducted to better capture students’ experiences in statistics classes. Conclusion Researching predictors of graduate students’ statistical self-efficacy beliefs is important to identifying possible barriers to professional growth and development. Exploring how statistical self-efficacy beliefs relate to predicting future academic expectations, performance, effort, persistence, and course selection (Pajares, 1996; Zimmerman, 2000) also is important to explore as a means of promoting professional development (Lent et al., 1984, 1986). Graduate students who believed they were incapable of achieving success in a statistics course demonstrated higher levels of anxiety (Onwuegbuzie, 2000). This anxiety was pervasive among the 75% to 80% of graduate students in the social sciences profession in previous research studies (Onwuegbuzie et al., 2000), as well as to the 53% of the graduate students in this study. Additionally, graduate students hold off from taking a statistics course due to their negative attitudes towards the subject matter (Gal & Gingsburg, 1994). Teaching graduate students how to reduce their anxiety and improve their attitude will likely enhance their value of statistics and further encourage their professional development in the counseling profession. References Araki, L. T., & Shultz, K. S. (1995, April). Students attitudes toward statistics and their retention of statistical concepts. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association, Los Angeles. Auzmendi, E. (1991, April). Factors related to attitudes toward statistics: A study with a Spanish sample . Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL. Baloglu, M. (2002). Psychometric properties of the statistics anxiety rating scale. Psychological Reports, 90 , 315–325. Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavior change. Psychological Review, 84 , 191–251. Berk, R. A. & Nanda, J. P. (1998). Effects of jocular instructional methods on attitudes, anxiety, and achievement in statistics courses. International Journal of Humor Research, 11 , 383–409. Bonilla, J. (1997). Vulnerabilidad a la intomatologia depresiva: Variables personales, cognoscitivas y contextuales. Manuscrito sin publicar, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras: PR. Cashin, S. E., & Elmore, P. B. (1997, March) . Instruments used to assess attitudes toward statistics. A psychometric evaluation. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Cashin, S. E., & Elmore, P. B. (2005). The survey of attitudes toward statistics scale: A construct validity study. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 65 , 509–524. Cohen, S., & McKay, G. (1984). Social support, stress and the buffering hypothesis: A theoretical analysis. In A. Baum, J. E. Singer, & S. I. Taylor (Eds.), Handbook of psychology and health (Vol. 4, pp. 253–267). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Cohen, S., & Wills, T. A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98 , 310–357. Cruise, R. J., Cash, R. W., & Bolton D. L. (1985, August). Development and validation of an instrument to measure statistical anxiety. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association Statistics Education Section. Las Vegas, Nevada. Cruise, R., & Wilkins, E. (1980). STARS: Statistical anxiety rating scale . Unpublished manuscript, Andrews University, Michigan. Davis, S. (2003). Statistics anxiety among female African American graduate-level social work students. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 23 , 143–158. Elmore, P. B., Lewis, E. L., & Bay, M. L. G. (1993, April). Statistics achievement: A function of attitudes and related experiences . Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Atlanta, GA. Faul, F. (2006). G*Power Version 3.0.3 [Computer software]. Retrieved October 12, 2007, from http://www.psycho.uni - duesseldorf.de/abteilungen/aap/gpower3/