Despite today’s increasingly data-driven business environment, many marketing students continue to perceive engagement with data as intimidating, limiting their willingness to develop essential analytical competencies and undermining their preparedness for contemporary marketing roles. To address this challenge, the present research examines a pedagogical intervention centered on data storytelling—an approach that reframes quantitative and qualitative information as building blocks for constructing coherent, audience-oriented narratives. The proposed module assigns students to analyze public polling data across domains, including business, technology, culture, and politics. From sentiment on electric vehicles and sports betting to trends in drinking habits and parenthood decisions, students investigate data on subjects of personal interest and present their findings to their peers. This intervention was evaluated using a two-wave survey across three sections of a capstone marketing research course, supplemented by a graded post-module exam in a subsequent analytics course. Results indicated significant improvements in students’ self-reported data literacy, attitudes toward quantitative tasks, and exam performance. Collectively, these findings suggest that data storytelling represents a promising pedagogical strategy for mitigating math anxiety and positioning data as a communicative resource to address real-world challenges in society and the marketplace.
Andrew Edelblum (Mon,) studied this question.