International Research in Education ISSN 2327-5499 2015, Vol. 3, No. 2 http://ire.macrothink.org 158 Students’ Conceptions of Statistics: An Exploration of Attitudes across Majors Hana Sulieman (Corresponding author) Department of Mathematics & Statistics American University of Sharjah Sharjah, UAE, 26666 E-mail: hsulieman@aus.edu Received: May 18, 2015 Accepted: July 24, 2015 Published: September 29, 2015 doi:10.5296/ire.v3i2.7622 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ire.v3i2.7622 Abstract Students from different majors taking statistics course view their statistics learning experience differently. In this work, a survey of 440 undergraduate students from various majors who took an introductory statistics course at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) in Fall 2012 or earlier semesters was conducted. Analysis of the survey data showed that 66% of the students have positive attitude toward statistics. Engineering majors who indicated the most negative attitude toward statistics associated their negativity to difficulty of the topic and the teaching method. Social sciences majors reported ‘general dislike of mathematics’ as the most significant contributing factor to their negative attitude toward statistics. Students with architecture and design majors were the most to associate their negative attitude toward statistics to its nonuse in their future career. On contrary, natural sciences’ students were most likely to believe that statistics is an interesting topic and would be used in future career. Female students were also more likely than male students to find statistics related to their field of study and future career. Some implications of the findings for future teaching of statistics were discussed. Keywords: statistics education, students’ attitudes, statistics anxiety 1. Introduction A course in statistics is required by large number of undergraduate majors as a major requirement or as a general education requirement. It is a common experience for statistics educators to observe some negative attitude of students in an introductory statistics class.