The importance of teaching statistics in a professional context

This study investigates how the attitudes of marketing and psychology students differ and whether the differences are inherent from the start or develop as they progress through their degree. While statistics is equally useful for careers in marketing and psychology, third year marketing students are shown to have much less positive attitudes towards statistics than their psychology counterparts. It is suggested that this difference may be as a result of differences in the two course structures and that embedding statistics more fully into specific discipline areas improves student attitudes and helps to prepare them better for the workplace.