Relationship between college teachers' use of humor in the classroom and students' evaluations of their teachers.

Abstract

In a field study, naive students unobtrusively tape-recorded one class presentation and evaluated the teacher as to appeal, competence, delivery, and teaching effectiveness. The presentations were content analyzed to identify key features relating to humor usage. Following a factor analysis of aspects of evaluation, correlation coefficients were computed between the teachers' frequency of use of the various types of humor and students' evaluations of their professors. The results indicate that for male teachers, usage of humor is generally positively related to appeal, delivery, and teaching effectiveness. For female teachers, only the use of hostile humor was associated with enhanced appeal. In contrast, female teachers' usage of some nonhostile forms of humor was associated with loss of appeal.

Humor in British academic lectures and Chinese students’ perceptions of it

“…Bryant et al, 1980;Frymier et al, 2008;Wanzer and Frymier, 1999;Wanzer et al, 2006). In the field of applied linguistics, Lee (2006) uses data from the Michigan Corpus of Spoken English (MICASE) to show that laughter is frequent in American academic speech, including lectures.…”

The risks and rewards of teaching with humour in Western Sydney: Adapting pedagogy to complex demographics

“…The focus in much of the literature has been on whether humour is productive in improving memory recall or in directly improving learning. Indeed, there is no consensus in the literature that the use of humour can actually achieve this end anyway (see for instance, conflicting results from Bryant, Comisky, Crane, & Zillmann, 1980;Ennis, 2003;Fields, 2011;Fowler, 2006;Frymier, Wanzer, & Wojtasczyk, 2008;Hellman, 2007;James, 2004;Kaplan & Pascoe, 1977;Kuhrik, Kuhrik, & Berry 1997;Nesi, 2012;Powell & Andresen, 1985;Wanzer, Frymier, Wojtaszczyk, & Smith, 2006).…”

Video-Conference Interviews: Ethical and Methodological Concerns in the Context of Health Research

“…The majority of this literature highlights the positive outcomes that result when humour is used in the classroom setting, such as the positive relationship between the use of humour and student learning (Ziv 1988, Gorham and Christophel 1990, Wanzer and Frymier 1999, Wanzer, Frymier and Irwin 2010 as well as teacher evaluations (Bryant et al 1980, Wanzer and Frymier 1999, Torok, McMorris and Lin 2004. Furthermore, the use of humour in the class room has been found to create an enjoyable learning environment (Ulloth 2002), where students are less anxious and stressed (Chabeli 2008) and more willing to participate.…”