Studies on university level statistics instruction, particularly in the social and educational sciences, suggest that courses on quantitative research methods are challenging both for teachers and for students (e.g. Rautopuro, Väisänen & Malin 2007). Factors that cause learning problems in quantitative methods can be associated with students’ non-cognitive of socio-personal factors, such as negative emotions, resistant attitudes, beliefs, lack of motivation as well as mathematics and statistics anxiety, weak self-confidence in learning statistics, and low self-efficacy (e.g. Rautopuro, Väisänen & Malin 2007; Murtonen 2005). It has also been noted that the university students’ poor skills and enduring misconceptions in statistics still exist after one or more courses of statistics (e.g. Hirch & O’Donnel 2001). To overcome these difficulties the following teaching method was developed and afterwards evaluated by the presenter: 1) Teaching the basics of how to make a good inquiry and making the inquiry of students own (subjects decided by the students), 2) Gathering the students own data, 3) Teaching the basic and selected advanced methodology of analyzing statistical data, 4) Analyzing the data (by students), 5) Writing a short research report.

Hirch, L.S. & O’Donnel, A.M. (2001). Representativeness in statistical reasoning. Identifying and assessing misconceptions. Journal of Statistics Education, 9. Murtonen, M. (2005). University students’ research orientations – Do negative attitudes exist toward quantitative methods? Scandinavian Journal of educational Research, 49, 263-280. Rautopuro, J., Väisänen, P. & Malin, A. (2007). From misundestanding to misapplication? Difficulties encoutered by Finnish students of education in learning quantitative research methods. In M. Murtonen, J. Rautopuro, & P. Väisänen (Eds.) Learning and teaching of research methods at university. Finnish Educational Research Association. Research in Educational Sciences 30, 17-38.