Instructor Immediacy and Statistics Anxiety Among Social Work Undergraduate Students

Background and purpose: Having a basic understanding of statistics is important for social work professionals for effective practice and program evaluation. However, many students in non-mathematical disciplines (e.g., social sciences) often feel great fear and anxiety towards statistics courses. This fear of statistics and research has been referred to as statistics anxiety, which is defined as feelings of anxiety encountered when taking a statistics course or doing statistical analyses, including gathering, processing, and interpreting data. It has been estimated that as many as 80 per cent of college students experience levels of statistics anxiety. A review of the literature reveals that instructors’ immediacy can influence various student affective and other learning outcomes, including academic anxiety. Instructor immediacy refers to a set of communicative behaviors that influence the perception of psychological and physical availability. Although there is ample evidence in literature which highlights the factors that contribute to statistics anxiety, as well as the impact of instructor immediacy on students’ learning outcomes, this area has received little attention among social work majors. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between instructor immediacy and statistics anxiety among undergraduate social work students. It is hypothesized that students who report receiving higher levels of instructor immediacy would report lower levels of statistics anxiety.

 Methods: Data was collected from 113 social work undergraduate students enrolled in a Social Work Research Method course at a large publicly funded university in the West Coast through the use of a survey questionnaire. Measures include the 51-item Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale and the 23-item Instructor Immediacy Scale.

 Results: Respondents ranged in age from 20-54 years (Mean =25.23, SD=6.86), of whom 82.3% were female, and 51.3% self-identified as Mexican American. Based on median percentile rank equivalent scores, about half of the participants in the current study scored higher than did 53% of the norm group on statistics anxiety. The findings showed that instructor immediacy was significantly associated with worth of statistics (p<.01), interpretation anxiety (p<.01), test and class anxiety (p<.05), and computation self-concept (p<.05). Multiple regression analyses revealed that instructor immediacy accounted for 16% of the variance in students’ anxiety levels.

Conclusions and Implications: Increased used of immediacy by an instructor can help to reduce students’ levels of statistics anxiety. To reduce class and test anxiety, it will be helpful for instructors to incorporate intervention strategies such as group anxiety management training. To increase students’ views of the worth and usefulness of research for social work practice, it may be helpful to provide opportunities for students to learn through hands-on experience that extend beyond the classroom. As anxiety can become a barrier to gaining and developing research knowledge and skills and thereby hinder their learning, instructors can play a valuable role in helping to reduce student anxiety with effective teaching behaviors.