Dan Flockhart has been using fantasy football to teach math since 1989 — back when most of us weren’t even yet playing the game — and turned his methods into an official line of textbooks that have been on the market since 2005. So, he already would have told you what an effective teaching tool fantasy sports can be.

Still, it never hurts to get a little official research behind you.

That’s why Flockhart collaborated with leading fantasy industry researcher Dr. Kim Beason to discover that our games really can raise students’ test scores.

“This is huge,” Beason reportedly said of the findings. “Across the board, both boys’ and girls’ test scores are up dramatically.”

Frankly, this study just helps to give real backing to a theory that makes immediate sense. Even the Berenstain Bears books I read to my daughter (and she then recites to herself) present the concept of teaching math to students via play, through active exercises that can be fun rather than words pulled straight from a 50-year-old text.

As Flockhart says, fantasy sports can take otherwise abstract concepts and from a subject such as algebra that challenges many a student and show their applications to real-life situations.

“If ‘T’ equals the number of touchdowns, then students know what they are dealing with,” Flockhart said. “Fantasy sports links math in the classroom to math in the real world.”

Hey, it worked for Tom Hanks’ character in Big.

Flockhart presents other findings from the teacher-survey portion of the study on his site, FantasySportsMath.com, such as these nuggets:

– 75 percent of teachers say students better understand math concepts when taught via the fantasy sports curriculum.

– 81 percent said students are more enthusiastic about math class.

We’ll look more at the results of this study as they become available.

Who: Dr. Kim Beason

What: Associate professor, park and recreation management, Ole Miss

Founder, Fantasy Sport Research Specialists LLC

Back in 2001, Dr. Beason went searching for studies on fantasy sports consumers, curious to find out why people played and what impact these games had on professional sports. He found the area lacking. Seeing a need for better understanding of this growing phenomenon, he decided to collect the data on his own but was stonewalled in his attempts to connect with companies that could provide customer lists.

That led the Ole Miss professor to trudge out to Las Vegas (not a bad destination if you have to trudge) and pitched his idea to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (then known as the Fantasy Sports Players Association). He offered to match the group’s funding through the first three years of a research project in return for the FSTA encouraging its members to supply consumer targets for the research. A partnership was born.

From the first study in 2002 and 2003, Beason’s pursuit of learning more about those who play fantasy sports quickly grew into popular and valuable research on the fantasy market and the consumer-spending habits of participants. Businesses used the data to court advertisers and more effectively target consumers. Media outlets latched onto the numbers to reflect the growth in this particular entertainment industry. Perhaps most importantly, the study’s valuable findings have driven up inquiries from FSTA constituents, which has in turn enhanced the breadth and depth of the information collected.

“Dr. Beason is the godfather of fantasy sports market research,” says Jeff Thomas, president of the FSTA and CEO of SportsBuff.com, which owns this site. “He took a chance on our small association many years ago, funded many of his own expenses to help kick off our research efforts and is now recognized as the top fantasy sports consumer behavior expert in the world.”

The project grew to the point that in 2006, Beason founded Fantasy Sport Research Specialists LLC “to serve as a clearinghouse for research,” an enterprise he shares with three partners. Although the annual FSTA study - whose sixth set of annual results were presented at the FSTA conference in Chicago on July 8 and 9 - is the company’s primary focus, there are other considerations as well.

“We also explore fantasy sport as a medium to teach children, relationships and differences between the fantasy sports and gaming industries, and fantasy sport in the workplace,” Beason says. “FSRS also conduct specialty-market, branding and product-development research for individual fantasy sport companies.”

Not surprisingly, all of this work stemmed from a career as a fantasy-sports player that began in 1989 with a keeper football league at Ole Miss. Beason quickly learned in his second season not to mix business too closely with pleasure, however, when hosting the league’s draft in a campus classroom nearly got him fired.

“My butt was in a sling for about 2 weeks,” he says. “I had to convince them (they were still skeptical) that what we did wasn’t gambling but a game of skill, and the league fees - 30 bucks - was given to the winner.  I ended up hanging on to my job by promising to never, ever, conduct another fantasy sport event on campus.”

Then again, one might argue that the lesson didn’t really take root.

“Heck, I play and research fantasy sport as a (small) part of my job!” Beason says. “Talk about fortunate.”

Our response to the poor “research” by Challenger, Gray & Christmas that has fantasy football costing employers billions each season ran earlier this week, but we’re not yet ready to drop the subject.

Dr. Kim Beason, who knows a thing or two about fantasy sports research, has this response to the $9 billion folks:

Challenger leans heavily on internet use as the waster of most time. Clearly, much time at work is not “work.” If someone does primarily work on the computer, they can multitask easily, limiting the impact of online fantasy sport consumption. Furthermore, Much fantasy sport talk around the computer “wastes” the same amount of time as any other frivolous chat, gossip, etc.

Therefore, much of Challenger’s “waste” occurs regardless of fantasy sport. In reality, fantasy sport in the workplace does take time away from production, but the tradeoff is significant. Undeniably, fantasy sport is a significant workplace dynamic.

Work time is wasted by consumers playing fantasy football, but, once again, the focus must also include the positive, which include building social networks (a key to the Japanese-style of management, and we see what that has done for them!).

Less than 30 percent of workers say the time they “waste” interferes with their work productivity. A very significant number (53 percent) state that fantasy sport increases camaraderie, and 48 percent have made friends playing fantasy sport in the workplace. My comments to media sources in the past have gone something like this …

“Fantasy sport is a dynamic that has developed within the workplace over the past 10 years. Friendships, workplace camaraderie, business contacts and fun offset the amount of productivity lost. Most productivity lost would happen regardless of fantasy sport participation through gossip, computer games, daydreaming and similar outlets. However, fantasy sport appears to not have as high a degree of negative impact as the other ‘time wasters.’ Conversely, it has increased the cohesiveness of workers and thus must improve work productivity, decrease absenteeism and sick leave and, most importantly, develop social networks that support organizational and interorganizational relations and growth.”

A new report by eMarketer finds that sports websites will pull in just more than $1.7 billion in revenue this year and approach $3 billion by 2012.

The study projects that total revenue will more than double over the six-year period beginning with 2007. Sports websites collected $1.489 billion in total revenue last year, according to the report, Sports Site Marketing: Ad Revenue Models Pull Ahead. The number is expected to become $2.955 billion by 2012.

Although sports sites currently depend on pay content for a large portion of their revenue streams, advertising is expected to be the big growth area over the next few years. Whereas the eMarketer numbers call for just a 43 percent increase in revenue from pay content from 2007 to 2012, the projections have advertising revenues climbing by about 138 percent, from $812,000 last year to $1.95 million in 2012.

We can only assume that fantasy sports sites will make up a significant portion of this group, as recent FSTA and Ipsos research has shown the fantasy market growing at a rate of about 23 percent a year over the past five years. As the studies have also shown, online fantasy users are a rapt audience, and one that tends to be on the young side and earn a decent amount of money on average. That’s just the kind of group advertisers like to reach.

Those ad dollars are just waiting for fantasy providers to go out and grab them.