Measuring School Spirit: A National Teaching Exercise

Abstract

We developed a novel variation on classroom data collection by having students conduct a national research project. Students at 20 different colleges and universities measured "school spirit" at their institutions according to several operational criteria (school apparel wearing, car stickers, alumni donation rate, ratings by a major sports publication, and questionnaire measures). Instructors then combined this information into one large dataset, allowing students to analyze and compare trends measured at their school with those measured at other schools. We discuss the process of organizing a national study (recruitment of faculty participants, dissemination of instruments, compilation of data), aspects of the project that instructors thought were most educationally valuable, and substantive results of the study (how well the different measures of school spirit correlated).

Harnessing the Undiscovered Resource of Student Research Projects

“…Already, the scores of undergraduate presentations at APA regional conferences each year demonstrate that honors and capstone students regularly replicate studies that are “in vogue.” Although many of these replication studies fail to demonstrate a novel effect, they often provide valuable replication information that goes unnoticed. Further, past efforts to generate collective undergraduate research projects (Grahe et al, 2012; School Spirit Study Group, 2004) have demonstrated that undergraduates generate reliable and valid findings in research-methods classes with associated pedagogical benefits. Though there are challenges in managing teaching-related research projects across multiple institutions, a question-list paradigm addresses many of the challenges associated with undergraduate research contributions.…”

The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing Psychology Through a Distributed Collaborative Network

“…An early published example of this kind of crowdsourcing in psychological research, the Emerging Adulthood Measured at Multiple Institutions (EAMMI) project (Reifman & Grahe, 2016), was conducted in 2004. The EAMMI collaborators pooled data collected by undergraduate students in statistics and research-methods courses at 10 different institutions (see also The School Spirit Study Group, 2004). In more recent projects, such as the Many Labs project series (Ebersole et al, 2016; Klein et al, 2014), Many Babies (Frank et al, 2017), the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (Open Science Collaboration, 2015), the Pipeline Project (Schweinsberg et al, 2016), the Human Penguin Project (IJzerman et al, 2018), and Registered Replication Reports (Alogna et al, 2014; O’Donnell et al, 2018; Simons, Holcombe, & Spellman, 2014) research teams from many institutions have contributed to large-scale, geographically distributed data collection.…”