The use of popular music to teach introductory economics in a live and online environment

This paper analyses how the incorporation of a music project influences final examination scores, student evaluation results, and overall attendance rates in a pre-principles economics course. The course - personal money management and consumer economics - caters to non-economics majors, primarily majoring in elementary education. While the literature in economic education has discussed using music to teach undergraduate students, nothing has been done to see how the use of this non-traditional approach influences students learning economics at a lower level. This paper makes an important contribution to this gap in the literature by comparing examination, student evaluation, and attendance results across live and online sections of the course. Evidence suggests that the incorporation of a music project linking musical lyrics to economic concepts has a positive influence on course attendance and student evaluations for courses taught in a live and online format. Changing the music project to include a segment where students write their own song lyrics has a positive influence on final examination scores.