A scientific study proves that education with humor is more effective.
By Daniella Ashkenazy
A young man walking to work looks up at a building and spies a beautiful, blonde-haired woman looking down from the eighth floor. Heart thumping, he runs into the building. Finding the elevator out of order, he races up the stairs and, breathlessly arriving at the womans door, rings the bell. When a massive ugly man answers, the young man asks, "Can I see the lady?" Before he has finished the sentence, the brute beats him up and kicks him down the stairs.
The next day as he is walking to work, the young man looks up again at the same building, and there she is at the window, looking more beautiful than ever! Mounting the steps, he arrives at her door, and rings the doorbell. Woe and behold, the same ugly brute answers, and throws him down the stairs - this time inflicting an injury on his forehead that requires 12 stitches.
The third day, he sees her again. Unable to resist, he limps painfully up the stairs, arriving exhausted at her door. He rings the bell. This time, she opens the door herself. Staring at her in wonderment, the young man blurts out, "Wheres the big guy?"
This joke was told to a college psychology class, not to elicit a laugh, or to win the "most popular lecturer on campus" award. It was told in order to illustrate the concept of conditioning, as part of a scholarly study - the first of its kind - to scientifically investigate the effect of humor in teaching.
Humor has always enjoyed a positive image. While not a panacea capable of healing patients, studies have shown that a good dose of humor can act as a sedative. In the field of education, more than fifty papers have been written praising the value of humor in teaching, says Tel Aviv University Professor of Psychology Avner Ziv. Yet very few research projects have tried to verify empirically the positive effect of humor which is widely accepted (though not necessarily practiced) in the eductional community. Ziv hypothesized that humor was not only an attention-getter, but also a paradigm of associative learning. .
A survey of professional literature on the subject revealed that earlier attempts at assessing the effect of humor in the field of education revealed that either humor has no effect on learning, or at best any benefit gained was in reducing anxiety, rather than enhancing retention of information.
Ziv, who has edited an academic volume on Jewish humor, found many weak points in the research: much of it dealt with "rating" humor based solely on students subjective evaluations of teachers; other experiments, which strove to measure objectively the effect of humor employed by teachers were not comprehensive enough. Subjects typically watched a videotaped lecture, often by professional actors, and were then tested for retention of information. No one had yet conducted systematic research on actual teaching in the classroom, on an ongoing basis, by genuine educators.
Ziv believed that students who attended lectures containing relevant humor would obtain higher scores on a test measuring what they had learnt than those studying the same material with the same teacher when he or she refrained from using humor.
Two studies were conducted on two different academic subjects: statistics, and an introductory course in psychology at a teachers college. In both cases, lectures were given to a control group and to an experimental group. The lectures attended by the experimental group were highlighted with humorous cartoons and jokes relevant to the concepts taught. The two instructors one for the statistics course and one for the psychology course were both graduates of a special seminar on "humor in teaching".
Both groups in each course then took a multiple-choice final exam on their subject. The results were clear: participants taught with humor achieved higher scores than those who had attended the conventional lectures.
Ziv presented his findings in a recently-published article in the Journal of Experimental Education. In the article, however, he qualified the effect of humor in education. Humor, he claims, can significantly increase recall, but it should be used sparingly: in a previous study, Ziv had found that the optimal dosage of humor desired to be effective was, at most, three to four instances of humor per hour. Thus in order to gain maximum benefit, humor should be mobilized only to underscore core concepts. Moreover, he warns, sarcasm can have a negative effect. He concludes by stressing that humor is not a prerequisite for teaching, and is certainly not the most important quality for a good teacher: it should be used only by those who feel comfortable with it.