부산대학교 도서관

Competence in statistics is a fundamental component of a biological scientist's toolbox. However, anxiety often affects undergraduate students' development of this competence and research has shown that perceived self-efficacy for statistics is correlated to academic performance. Self-efficacy may be promoted by reducing anxiety, and also allowing students to practice their skills in groups to model approaches used and obtain peer feedback. We undertook action research to investigate how a change in teaching method to team-based learning (TBL) affected our students. The first iteration of the teaching with Year 2 students led us to change our delivery to allow more time for teamworking for the next iteration with Year 1 students. We found that some measures of self-efficacy were correlated with a post-TBL summative test performance of Year 1 and Year 2 students. However, Year 1 students were less positive about TBL. This corroborated quantitative findings revealing that they had lower collective efficacy than Year 2 students, despite teams performing as well during formatively assessed TBL. We draw on self-efficacy theory to better understand why students perceive and report differing learning experiences, and to make recommendations for designing teaching and learning that helps build their self-efficacy.