A Study on Instructional Humor: How Much Humor Is Used in Presentations?

Humor is applied in pedagogy to create a positive learning environment. Recent research focuses on the theories, effects, individual differences, and qualitative aspects of humor for instruction. However, there is a lack of studies focusing on quantitative features. Therefore, this research explored the quantitative characteristics of instructional humor in a naturalistic setting and applied techniques from natural language processing (NLP). This paper describes the results of two studies. The first study focused on instructional humor frequency and the placement of humor, while the linguistic features of instructional humor and non-instructional humor were compared in the second study. Two corpora were used in this research: TED Talks and user-submitted jokes from “stupidstuff.org” The results found that educators used humor 12.92 times for popular talks, while less popular talks only had 3.92 times. Humor is also more commonly placed during the first parts of the talk and lessens toward the end. There were also significant differences between the linguistic features of instructional and non-instructional humor in terms of readability scores and sentiment. These results provide a substantial update on quantitative instructional humor research and help educators understand how to use humor in the classroom in terms of quantitative and linguistic features.

Preliminary Verification of Instructional Humor Processing Theory: Mediators Between Instructor Humor and Student Learning

Instructional humor processing theory has been proposed to explain how the type of humor used by the course instructor can affect student learning. In this study, a cross-sectional design was used to test whether the relation between the instructor’s type of humor (related, unrelated, self-disparaging, offensive, and disparaging humor), and learning is mediated by variables assumed by the instructional humor processing theory (emotion, motivation, and information-processing ability). A total of 360 university and junior college students with a mean age of 19.31 years (standard deviation = 0.75) completed a questionnaire concerning their impression on the instructor humor, emotion, motivation, processing ability, and cognitive learning in a specific course. The results revealed that the instructor’s-related humor significantly predicted the cognitive learning of students, and their relation can be mediated by all variables assumed by instructional humor processing theory. Our results provided preliminary evidence for the legitimacy of the instructional humor processing theory model.

Humor in University Teaching: Role of Teachers’ Achievement Goals and Self-efficacy for their use of Content-related Humor

Teachers’ content-related humor matters for the quality of higher education, however, little is known about the circumstances under which teachers use it. From a socio-cognitive perspective, teachers’ achievement goals and self-efficacy appear to be relevant personal precursors. We investigated their effects on content-related humor in two studies. In Study 1, 229 teachers (79 female; 159 PhDs; 33 full professors) participated with 387 courses while 10,296 students assessed the humor in these courses. Study 2 used a similar design for 45 teachers (20 female; 27 PhDs, 9 full professors), 116 course sessions, and 2,333 student assessments. Three-level-analyses pointed to substantial variance in students’ assessments of content-related humor which could be attributed to differences between courses/sessions within teachers (ICC=.12–.13) and between teachers themselves (ICC=.21). In both studies, performance (appearance component) avoidance goals emerged as negative predictors, and relational goals and self-efficacy as positive predictors of content-related humor, highlighting the relevance of instructors’ motivations for the use of instructional humor.

Humor in Interpersonal Communication

Effective humor enactment has been proven to be beneficial to both senders and receivers of the communication. Use of humor in social interaction has the potential to elicit positive perceptions, improve interpersonal interactions, reduce conflict, aid in coping, and even facilitate health outcomes. In contrast, poorly communicated, ill-timed, or maladaptive humor is often detrimental to both personal perceptions and relationships. Specific factors regarding these bidirectional outcomes are examined in this article. Humorous enactments are inherently a goal-oriented form of communication that involves social, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral elements. The individual intends to accomplish some goal through communicating humor, no matter how obscure or subconscious the act might seem. Hence the communicator encodes verbal and/or nonverbal messages to achieve this aim. By comparison, genuine responses to humor (whether a trait pattern or situationally immediate) are not goal-oriented, but rather spontaneous reactions to humorous messages. Therefore, laughter, snickering, and the like may be authentic, unguarded amusement responses. Research and discussion of interpersonal humor entail several foundational premises which must be addressed: productive and unproductive forms of humor, differences between source and receiver approaches, interactional versus presentational perspectives, varying functions and outcomes of humor across different stages of relationship development and decline, as well as attention to some less-often studied contexts. The application of theoretical frameworks such as Incongruity, Instructional Humor Processing, Superiority, Dispositional, and Benign Violations theories help guide our predictions and explanations of humorous messages.

Humor dalam Pembelajaran “Tinjauan Penelitian Humor di Kelas”

This article is a summary of research on Instructional humor. The analysis conducted on several journal articles and books to find identification and explain the inconsistencies in the results of research. First, the communication will be reviewed on the basis of humor. This section describes the definition, theory and function of humor in learning both in the psychological perspective and student's academic achievement. Second, an overview of the research results in a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Frequency of use of humor, kind humor and appropriateness for classroom. Lastly, discussions were conducted to see the potential humor and suggestions for teachers in the classroom.