Abstract:

The poor performance of Health Sciences students undertaking Statistics (stats) has become a great concern. These students do not take Mathematics (maths) as one of their subjects. They then tend to struggle in stats because of lack of maths enhancement. For these students, to master stats is a necessity, especially for those who have to do research. The Department of Statistics and Operations Research (DSOR) at Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University (SMU) offers stats courses to both the School of Science & Technology (SST) and the School of Health Sciences (SHS) students. Pass rates in SST are decent, probably because these students take maths as one of their subjects. However, the same cannot be said about the pass rates for SHS students. These students seem to struggle in the concepts of stats when compared with those in the SST. This research examines the performance of students studying stats from the SHS in SMU. The data will be collected from Physiotherapy and Occupational therapy third year students in Research Design and Statistics class for the academic years 2010 to 2018. The results will be compared with the same year groups from SST. The maths concepts of importance to stats will be determined, and the teaching of future groups in the SHS will be adjusted in line with those findings. It is also of interest to this discussion to determine the proportion of students who will improve on their performance in a few future years to determine the effectiveness of the intervention.

Keywords:

Academic performance, Statistics, Mathematics.