It’s Only Rock ‘N ’ Roll, 1 It’s Only Rock ‘N ’ Roll But I Like It: How Songs Can Help Teach Statistics

Two ingredients to successful teaching are to motivate students to learn material being presented and to present material in an understandable manner. Within one particular class it seems it is harder to motivate students, yet is most crucial to present material in a very clear, concise and understandable fashion. This class is the communication research methods and statistics course. One way of motivating and helping students to understand material is to relate the material to be learned to something the students are familiar with and care about. Music is one of those “somethings ” that students are familiar with and care about. Using popular rock and roll songs to enhance learning in the research methods and statistics class is a fun and motivating teaching method to help get students excited about class and to help students better understand difficult and often intimidating material. The lyrics to the songs are changed to reflect material from class and are then sung to the tunes of the original songs. The results are encouraging as, from a qualitative perspective, students mention how much they enjoy the statistical songs and how much the songs help them remember material from class. From a quantitative perspective, results of this teaching activity show a slight increase in test scores from “pre-song ” semesters to “post-song ” semesters