The Relationship Between Procrastination, Learning Strategies and Statistics Anxiety Among Iranian College Students: A Canonical Correlation Analysis

OBJECTIVE Approximately 66-80%of graduate students experience statistics anxiety and some researchers propose that many students identify statistics courses as the most anxiety-inducing courses in their academic curriculums. As such, it is likely that statistics anxiety is, in part, responsible for many students delaying enrollment in these courses for as long as possible. This paper proposes a canonical model by treating academic procrastination (AP), learning strategies (LS) as predictor variables and statistics anxiety (SA) as explained variables. METHODS A questionnaire survey was used for data collection and 246-college female student participated in this study. To examine the mutually independent relations between procrastination, learning strategies and statistics anxiety variables, a canonical correlation analysis was computed. RESULTS Findings show that two canonical functions were statistically significant. The set of variables (metacognitive self-regulation, source management, preparing homework, preparing for test and preparing term papers) helped predict changes of statistics anxiety with respect to fearful behavior, Attitude towards math and class, Performance, but not Anxiety. CONCLUSION These findings could be used in educational and psychological interventions in the context of statistics anxiety reduction.