Psychometric Properties of the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics in Spanish for Engineering and Mathematics Students at the National University of Costa Rica

Objective: Verify the psychometric properties, in terms of structural validity and internal consistency, of a Spanish version of Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics in its 36 -item version. Methods: The instrument was applied to 281 engineering and mathematics students from the National University of Costa Rica. In the first instance, a confirmatory factor analysis was applied to verify the factorial structure of the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics, whose goodness fit indexes were deficient. Results: The investigators carried out an exploratory factor analysis, which suggested the reconfiguration of items on four factors. Moreover, a confirmatory factor analysis was applied to this new configuration and its goodness and reliability indexes are considered satisfactory. Conclusion: Given the context of the application, a reduction of the original factorial structure of the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics in its 36 -item version would be appropriate, as well as a reconfiguration for the scales of difficulty, cognitive competence, affect, and value. Hence, the authors recommend continuing with the studies aimed at verifying if the factorial structure proposed in the instrument is maintained in other university contexts and with students from different areas of knowledge or, on the contrary, a different factorial structure is evidenced.