Role of hope in predicting anxiety about statistics

Hope is defined as a cognitive set which consists of level of goal-directed determination (agency) and propensity to plan ways to achieve goals (pathways). This study investigated whether hope was related to anxiety about statistics. Participants were 109 graduate students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds enrolled in courses on statistics and educational research methods. A canonical correlation analysis was interpreted as indicating that students who had the poorest sense of successful determination in relation to their goals and who had the least positive appraisals of their ability to generate ways to overcome goal-related obstacles and to reach their goals tended to have the highest anxiety associated with worth of statistics, interpretation, tests and class, computational self-concept, fear of asking for help, and fear of the instructor. Based on these findings, it is recommended that researchers investigate whether interventions aimed at agency and pathways help to reduce such anxiety.