Today's blog is written by Virginia Downing, Academic Success Manager and member of Sara Brownell's Biology Education Research Lab, Arizona State University When it comes to increasing student learning in college classes, active learning practices have been strongly recommended as a way to build students’ content knowledge. One common instructional practice in active learning classrooms is having students use clickers – handheld response devices – to answer instructor posed questions. Clickers allow all students in the class to be able to answer a question and the instructors can see how the class as a whole answered the question. By having students actively engage with the subject matter by answering questions, studies have shown that on average students learn more and fail less in these active learning courses compared to traditional lecture courses. However, what has yet to be explored in detail is how active learning practices like clickers may increase feelings of an...

Today's blog is written by Sara Brownell , PhD, Associate Professor School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. We all know the reputation of science instructors as unapproachable and boring. Yet they don’t have to be. One easy way for science instructors to connect better to students is to tell a joke – or two- in the classroom! A new study published by our research group in PLOS ONE explored student perceptions of college science instructor’s use of humor by surveying over 1600 students from 25 different college science classes. Overwhelmingly, students appreciated when instructors tried to be funny; in fact, 99% of students appreciated instructor use of humor! However, the type of humor seemed to matter for students. If the instructor told a joke that was perceived as offensive, then students related less to the instructor and felt as though they did not belong as much in class. However, when an instructor tells jokes that students think are funny, they be...