Malaysian Journal of Mathematical Sciences, September 2019, Vol. 13, No. 3
Effects of using RStudio on Statistics Performance of Malaysian Undergraduates
Salim, N. R., Gopal, K., and Ayub, A. F. M.
Corresponding Email: nurraidah@upm.edu.my
Received date: 31 August 2018
Accepted date: 29 May 2019
Abstract:
This paper aims to study the effectiveness of using RStudio (an open source statistical package) in learning statistics among undergraduate
students in Malaysia. A pre-post test quasi-experimental with control group design was employed. This study was conducted on 50 first year
students from various fields of study taking the Statistics for Applied Sciences subject for selected topics from the syllabus. The students
were equally assigned to the experimental and control groups respectively. Descriptive analysis showed that students performed better when using RStudio as compared to control group with higher means in post-test and post-delay-test scores. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was employed with the pre-test scores as covariate, group as the independent variable while post-test and post-delay-test scores as the dependent variables. ANCOVA indicated that there is a significant difference in the post-test scores between the groups as well as in the post-delay-test scores between the groups where students who has been exposed to and using RStudio achieved significantly better performance in pre-test and post-test. These findings imply that integration of a statistical package is effective in enhancing the learning process of statistics. In essence, statistical packages like RStudio would ease the learning process and help students to achieve better results in statistics.
Keywords: RStudio, statistics performance, analysis of covariance, statistical package
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