Afraid to Excel: A Survey of Student Attitudes and Anxiety Towards Spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel
Despite its integral role in academic scholarly research, undergraduate students in the social sciences report low proficiency and high anxiety when tasked with analyzing spreadsheets.
Presented by:
Nadine Gibson, University of North Carolina Wilmington
Abstract:
Despite the widespread use of spreadsheets in quantitative empirical research, this study finds that undergraduate students report relatively low levels of sophistication and high levels of anxiety when it comes to the use of spreadsheet management software, such as Microsoft Excel. To gauge students' attitudes and anxiety towards spreadsheets, an online survey was administered to 414 undergraduate students enrolled in political science, sociology, criminology, and first-year seminar courses in Fall 2023 through Spring 2025. Preliminary findings highlight the misalignment between the expectations of professors and the reality for many undergraduate students tasked with analyzing spreadsheets.
Keywords:
Anxiety, Research Methods, Spreadsheets
Learning Outcomes:
1. Identify their own biases when assigning tasks that require the analysis of data in spreadsheets.
2. Learn how to better target resources that meet students’ needs for utilizing spreadsheet management software outside of the classroom (i.e., homework).
3. Reimagine the integration of software such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets into research methods course curricula.
Afraid to Excel: A Survey of Student Attitudes and Anxiety Towards Spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel
Hear it from the author:
Transcript:
Hi, my name is Nadine Gibson, and I am an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and I am presenting my poster afraid to excel a survey of student attitudes and anxiety towards Microsoft Excel. This project was born out of a rough semester. I had integrating Excel into my undergraduate political science research methods course.
I noticed that students expressed high levels of anxiety when asked to complete what I believed were simple tasks in Excel, such as generating a bar chart or a crosstab. This signaled to me that there was a misalignment between my expectations and the ability of my students. This project systematically investigates this new type of anxiety that I observed and what I will call spreadsheet anxiety.
My preliminary results suggest that this is indeed a distinct type of anxiety. And that students Beyond my class feel a great deal of negative emotions about manipulating data and spreadsheets. This anxiety stems from a lack of formal instruction on manipulating spreadsheets prior to attending college.
References
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