ISHS 2007

Sense of Humor and Humor-Assisted Learning in College Students

Asil Ali Özdoğru and Robert F. McMorris

Appreciation and production of humor has cognitive, affective, and social components. Sense of humor is a psychological construct that is associated with many social, emotional, and health outcomes. We hypothesize that sense of humor as an individual differences variable can also influence cognitive processes and learning of basic concepts. Principles of aptitude-treatment interaction also assert that effectiveness of a treatment is the result of the interplay between individual characteristics of learners and qualities of instructional treatments. In order to test relative influences of sense of humor and humorous concept presentation on student learning, we surveyed 156 undergraduate seniors and graduate students. After students studied six one-page concept presentations–three with and three without humorous cartoons–from an introductory psychology textbook, they completed a questionnaire including demographic questions, rating items about their perceptions of the material, the Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale, and achievement items related to concepts. Our results did not show significant effect of sense of humor nor the humor treatment on learning outcomes, but students’ reported opinions favored using humorous instructional materials. Higher sense-of-humor scores are associated with more positive ratings of the humorous material. We discuss that consistent findings of favorable student perceptions about using humor in instruction and inconsistent results from studies looking at learning outcomes in the literature point out potential roles of instructional sensitivity, student motivation, and effect sizes on assessment of student learning.

Keywords: Sense of humor, learning, methodology

Citation: Özdoğru, A. A., & McMorris, R. F. (2007, June). Sense of humor and humor-assisted learning in college students. Paper presented at the 19th annual conference of the International Society of Humor Studies, Newport, RI, USA.