Abstract
In an introductory statistics course, undergraduate students often struggle with the concepts and techniques of statistical inference. At the heart of inference is the inconvenient fact that we often need to make decisions or draw conclusions without benefit of all the relevant facts in ambiguous situations. There is reason to think that students vary in their attitudes and
openness to ambiguity in general, and that an individual's discomfort with or intolerance of ambiguity could impede one's learning of inferential reasoning. Yet, little research has considered ambiguity tolerance as an explanatory or moderating
factor in learning to apply the techniques of inference directly. This paper reports on empirical classroom research to investigate the extent to which intolerance of ambiguity is an impediment to learning about statistical inference.