The School Spirit Project

 Five years ago, Alan Reifman (Texas Tech University) solicited colleagues over the Society for Personality and Social Psychology email listserv to participate in a national teaching exercise on School Spirit.

 The exercise was designed to engage research methods and statistics courses across the country in data collection and analysis. Twenty colleagues at 20 universities around the country participated, and the resulting effort was published in Teaching of Psychology. My statistics course at the University of Texas at El Paso participated then, and I’m pleased that my Research Methods course was able to participate in the 5 year anniversary data collection and analysis effort this Fall.

 Five elements of school spirit were assessed by 14 universities from the U.S. and Canada, including: car decorations, alumni giving, attitudes about school spirit, football attendance, and garment wearing.

 The students were required to operationally define all of their variables, design a study, collect the data, analyze it (their own data along with the national data set that resulted from the other schools’ participation), and create and present a poster of their work.

 This group project was in addition to the students completing their own individual research proposals this semester. Two of those students have chosen to present their work here as well.

 Thank you for your interest and attendance!

 Kim MacLin, Proud Instructor of These Emerging Scholars!