Humor in Teaching

September 16th, 2009

ResearchBlogging.orgOK, stop me if you’ve heard this one… three statisticians walk into a bar…happy_ferret

Is statistics funny? Neumann, Hood, & Neumann (2009) think they can make it funny, and sought to find out how students reacted to including humor in statistics classes. (It should be noted that this article is from a Journal of Statistics Education “Research to Practice” article in which the authors took another research article, tried it in their class, and are reporting on the results… pretty neat.) They looked at two semesters of classes with over 200 students and interviewed approximately 20 students from a stratified sample.

The authors give examples of the kinds of humor used in the course, consisting primarily of cartoons and visual images. For example, “Introducing the first statistical formulas can often be a daunting experience for non-mathematical students. Students were encouraged to be brave when dealing with formula by showing a picture of a squirrel “undressing” its fur to show the S of the Superman suit.”

What did the students think? They were asked about the positive and negative aspects of humor in the classroom. In general, responses fell into affective effects of humor (amuses, lightens mood, motivates to attend class) and cognitive (helped learning, helped maintain attention, provided mental break, reduces monotony). Comments were more positive than negative (although the questions asked appear to be more likely to yield positive responses).

It’s probably not surprising that students reported enjoying humor. It would be interesting to try some more controlled studies, but humor is so individual that it would be hard to tell a teacher who uses it not to use it or vice versa. But it would be interesting if teachers who were independently rated as “funnier” (by humor experts??) had better class attendence.

It’s also interesting that some students saw humor as a way to bring them back to attention while others saw it as providing a mental break from the content. Those seem like opposing results, I suppose depending on the students’ state prior to the joke.

Finally, are some types of humor more effective? This study focused on visual humor and unexpectedness, what about other types of humor? (Oh, and hit me up if you’ve got any jokes about statisticians.)

Neumann, D. L., Hood, M., & Neumann, M. M. (2009). Statistics? You Must Be Joking: The Application and Evaluation of Humor when Teaching Statistics Journal of Statistics Education, 17 (2)

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Posted in Teachers | Comments (4)

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4 Responses to “Humor in Teaching”

  1. Pteryxx Says:
    September 16th, 2009 at 10:01 pm

    Statistics humor via xkcd:

    http://www.xkcd.com/539/

  2. Monkeymagic » Connections Research Blog » Humor in Teaching Says:
    September 17th, 2009 at 1:03 am

    [...] here September 17th 2009 | Comments(0) | Asides on dubious humour research [...]

  3. Daniel Says:
    September 17th, 2009 at 6:03 am

    I only know one… and like it… this one… http://xkcd.com/552/

  4. admin Says:
    September 17th, 2009 at 7:59 am

    Thanks for both the xkcd links… nice!

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Connections Research is the blog for Connections Learning & Education Research. Look for summaries and commentary on new education-related research, as well my own observations of the field.

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