Statistics anxiety: a research idea on its protective factors and reduction with a mindful-based intervention

University students, in particular those belonging to non-STEM disciplines, might be affected by statistics anxiety, a negative emotional reaction when encountering statistics at any level (Chew & Dillon, 2014). This can impact on students’ wellbeing as well as on their academic performance. It thus becomes relevant to explore if and how statistics anxiety has an impact on academic performance, what can its protective factors be, and how we can reduce its effects. There are indeed several personality factors that can help people face stress and general anxiety, such as locus of control, hardiness, and self-efficacy. Similarly, mindful-based intervention, also those that are conducted via new technologies such as smartphones, can reduce stress and anxiety (Wu et al., 2022). To explore the above, we are planning a study about which we would really appreciate feedback, so that we can refine and improve it before we pre-register the study and start data collection. The main idea is to conduct an experiment where participants, all psychology university students, start by answering, at T1, a series of questionnaires, measuring locus of control, hardiness, self-efficacy (both general and academic), state, trait, and statistics anxiety. Then, half of the participants will be assigned to a mindful-present condition and the other half to a mindful-absent condition. Both will receive daily exercises in statistics and data-analysis over 4 days. Furthermore, the former will also be asked to complete a 3-minutes mindfulness intervention before doing the exercises, whereas the latter will not. The fifth day (T2), all participants will undertake a simulated statistics exam, but just before doing so they will first answer an adapted version of the test anxiety scale (Benson & El-Zahhar, 1994) in order to measure their anxiety for the upcoming simulated exam. The data will be then analyzed as follows. First, locus of control, hardiness, self-efficacy, state, and trait anxiety will be subjected to a cluster analysis to group participants with similar responding patterns. Then following model will be tested: cluster membership will be an exogenous variable; statistics anxiety, test anxiety and (simulated) exam performance will be endogenous variables. It is hypothesized that clusters marked by high scores on protective factors will be associated with lower anxiety; that lower anxiety is related to higher performance and that mindfulness moderates the relationship between statistics anxiety and test anxiety. For ethical reasons, participants who will not be assigned to the mindfulness condition will have the opportunity to learn how to do mindfulness exercises at the end of the experiment. With this study, we hope to contribute to the understanding of statistics anxiety and how students can deal with it.