Statistical Literacy - Shawn Loewen et al

Loewen, Shawn, et al. “Statistical Literacy Among Applied Linguists and Second Language Acquisition Researchers.” TESOL Quarterly 48.2 (2014): 360-388.

The purpose of this study was to investigate statistical knowledge and attitudes through self-reported surveys (rather than a performance-based measure).  Participants were largely from the fields of SLA, applied linguistics, and TESOL although psychology and education also received attention.

According to their own classification scheme, they considered three general levels of statistical knowledge (372).

• basic descriptive statistics knowledge: mean, median, standard deviation
• common inferential statistics: ANOVA, t-test, p-value, post-hoc test, chi-square loading
• advanced statistical knowledge: Rasch analysis, discriminate function analysis, structural equation modeling

In general, for attitudes, they found that participants considered statisics important, but often felt their training was inadequate with more phd students feeling underprepared than professors despite similar amounts of training.  The top three outside resources people used to interact with statistics were the internet, colleagues/friends, and textbooks.  Orientations to quantitative research had a positive correlation with perceptions of the value of statistics, but qualitative research orientations did not.

The authors never define what they mean by statistical literacy, but move quickly from introducing this term to discussing knowledge, which may be seen as a representation of knowledge as literacy.  They later talk about "conducting and reporting" as statistical practices (363).