Higher education (HE) in Portugal has increased steadily since the beginning of the 1980’s. However, despite the continuous public investment in HE, Portugal still has academic failure and survival rates that compare badly with most European countries (OECD 2010).

As it had been stressed by some previous studies failure in tertiary education occurs mostly in 1^st. cycle (graduation) mainly in curricular units that deal with quantitative methods such as Mathematics and Statistics.

The implementation of Bologna Chart has contributed to reinforce this trend as it led to shorter time duration for 1^st. cycle completion though syllabuses’ extension and complexity remained identical most of times (Chagas Lopes & Fernandes 2010) .

Academic failure in some of ISEG critical subjects had already been addressed throughout research developed by the ISEG Pedagogic Observatory (PO) (Fernandes & Chagas Lopes 2008; Chagas Lopes & Fernandes 2010). However, almost no attention was yet given to students’ attitudes and motivation towards the above. Many students enter statistics courses with negative attitudes or beliefs that may affect their success in Statistics. In fact, success will only happen if students think that these subjects are useful in their professional and personal lives, and believe that they can understand and use statistics.

This paper aims to examine selected non-cognitive features such as student’s feelings, beliefs, interests, expectations and motivations as proposed by the Social Cognitive and the Self-Determination Theories, (Bandura 1997; Nielsen 2009; …). In this paper we are particularly interested in students’ attitudes evolution from the moment they start their statistical courses and the moment they end them (two semesters). We believe that attention to such factors may contribute to a better understanding of how students' attitudes change while learning these subjects. Such knowledge will help teachers to develop new pedagogical methods that could enhance positive changes and weaken negative feelings in order to overcome failure in academic performance.

To further understand which factors influence students’ attitudes changes we analyze how they relate with some individual characteristics (gender, age, participation in the labor market), social economic status of the family (father and mother school level), HE trajectory (major, previous number of enrolments, number of ECTS completed, current average course mark).

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