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 ...

Are you finding that you're repeatedly asking your students to attend office hours, but still see low attendance? You are not alone. Office hours are often conducted in-person, on a scheduled day and time that the instructor is available. Typically these hours are posted online and in the syllabus. Yet, most students do not attend. Below are some options to try, that may encourage more students to attend your office hours! Have you tried virtual office hours?  This option does not have to be for online courses only. To do this you can use Zoom, and link it to your Canvas course. Instructors who have tried virtual office hours have been impressed with more students attending. This could simply be because students were unable to make it to campus on the scheduled day/time for office hours, but instead could join virtually. Here are some instructions to get you started (requires ASURITE log-in). Share a funny video with students about office hours. Another option to con...

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...