Using research on celebrity admiration to enhance your statistics class

Our goal was to show how inferential statistics can be used to answer questions stemming from real research in psychology on a topic of interest to many traditional college-age students. We created eight statistical problems of the sort found in introductory statistics courses for psychology (e.g., correlation, Z-test for difference between correlation coefficients, independent-samples t-test, paired-samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, chi-square goodness-of-fit test, chi-square contingency test). We constructed problems to illustrate findings from studies that used the Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS), with particular emphasis on studies that link addictive levels of celebrity worship with undesirable attitudes and behaviors. The CAS measures the strength of one's attachment to a favorite celebrity. We administered the eight problems to an experimental group of statistics students to determine if they could solve the problems concurrently with learning something about celebrity admiration. As compared to a control group that solved the same problems using different (non-celebrity) illustrations, the experimental group scored significantly higher on a posttest of knowledge about research on celebrity admiration, and rated the task more favorably. Results indicate that infusing real-world research on an interesting psychological topic, in this case celebrity admiration, can enhance students' interest in the statistics learning task while concurrently learning more about the real-world research.