Investigating University Students’ Attitudes and Understanding of Data Science Education: Developing Country Perspectives

The study aims to assess Bangladeshi public university students’ understanding of data science and related terminologies as well as measure their attitudes towards data science education. The study population comprised students from different departments of a public university in Bangladesh. A survey questionnaire was developed using Google Forms and distributed among the students via various social media platforms. Data were collected from the participants using a simple random sampling technique. A total of 433 data were collected. Findings displayed that the students showed different levels of understanding of the terminologies. The students were mostly familiar with the terms data, database and artificial intelligence but least familiar with data governance, behavioural analytics and predictive analytics. The findings also indicated that the participants generally possessed a positive attitude towards data science education and mentioned that such education was vital for them to become self-dependent and solve difficult problems. Students’ gender and age did not influence their attitude towards data science education, whether their geographic location, CGPA, faculty and participation in basic data science courses influenced their attitude. Finally, a significant positive correlation was found between students’ familiarity with data science terminologies and their attitudes towards data science education.