Imagine students sitting in a college classroom where attendance is required. The instructor is describing how the body works to maintain homeostasis and then the instructor tells a joke. How would you respond? Well, studies indicate that your response may depend on who you are. Humor as a powerful classroom tool A major objective of educators and instructors is to get students motivated and engaged in their classrooms. One way that instructors can create more engaging spaces for students is through the use of humor. Humor may be particularly helpful for science instructors to engage with students since they have been previously described by students as uninteresting and unfriendly. Humor can help instructors appear to be more relatable and like a “real person” to their students, potentially driving student motivation. However, humor has to be taken as funny for it to be an effective way to actually foster student engagement. A previous study conducted by our lab found that ...

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...