What constructs are being measured by instruments such as the ATS and SAS?
21 As mentioned earlier, items in both the SAS and ATS deal with respondents’ self-evaluation of several different issues: competence in dealing with statistical problems and calculations, competence in and attitudes towards dealing with mathematical tasks, interest in learning statistics, beliefs about the usefulness of statistics, and expectations regarding the relevance of statistics for their careers. While all these topics appear important and are aligned with the goals of statistics education, it is difficult to accept that students’ views, feelings, or attitudes towards these diverse issues are all combined into one (SAS) or two (ATS) global scores. The findings reported by Roberts and Reese (1987) regarding the similarity of the SAS and ATS scales (a reported correlation of 0.88 between the two scales), their homogeneity in terms of both high internal consistency (alpha coefficients exceeding 0.90), and their simple factorial structure (a single general factor, though Wise [198
