Attitudes of applied Social Science Courses’ students toward statistics

The objective of this research was to identify the students' behavior from Management and Accounting Courses in respect to the subject Statistics. The student's profile was obtained by the use of issues, the SATS scale (Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics), applied to 337 students from Management and Accounting Courses from 2 colleges. The research indicates 2 dimensions of attitude reached by factor analysis, denominated value and cognitive competence and difficulty. Cluster analysis was applied and found four groups of students, one of them has positive attitudes, one has negative attitudes and two don't have well defined attitudes. Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis were applied to verify the differences between the clusters attitudes, among the courses attitudes and between male and female attitudes. Students present positive behavior in connection to Statistics. However, there is an unfavorable behavior about the complexity of Statistics and their beliefs about learning statistical concepts and tools.