Jon Stewart Comes to Class: The Learning Effects of America (The Book) in Introduction to American Government Courses

Abstract

This project posits that incorporating political humor into the classroom can have a positive effect on learning in higher education. Specifically, we present preliminary findings from a quasi-experiment in which a humorous, “mock” textbook titled America (The Book) (Stewart, Karlin, and Javerbaum 2004) was incorporated into Introduction to American Government curricula in conjunction with a standard textbook. Our hypothesis argues that humorous presentations of politics and government can enhance the learning process and increase test scores by way of Matthew Baum's (2003a) “gateway” or “incidental by-product” effects. Our empirical findings show no such learning effect. Our qualitative evidence, however, suggests that humor-based teaching is clearly more engaging and interesting for the students.

Keywords:

• Daily Show
• infotainment
• soft news
• teaching political science

Notes

^a A laughable and unlikely scenario.

^b Vietnam, Haiti, Kosovo, Granada, Panama, and about 20 others.

^c Nicaragua, Chile and Cana-…we've said too much (44).

Note: Cell entries are unstandardized OLS coefficients with standard errors in parentheses.

∗p < .05.

Professor A had 91 students in the fall of 2005, while Professor B had 81; together, this was the control group. In the experimental group in the fall of 2006, Professor A had 81 students and Professor B had 16.

In order to protect against academic integrity issues associated with administering identical exams from one semester to the next, students were required to turn in their exam sheets with their answers. Only their grades were returned. Students were, of course, permitted to review the exam questions after they received their grades in the instructor's office, but they were not permitted to keep the exams.

It should be noted that students were informed that some of the content in the book was potentially offensive. Students were made aware that other reading options could be made confidentially available to accommodate individuals who might be offended. No students took us up on that option.

Both professors consistently have teaching evaluation scores that hover around the university mean. For similar classes (Introduction to American Government), professor A had a mean teaching evaluation score of 6.29 (n = 274, university mean = 5.99), while professor B scored 5.87 (n = 103, university mean = 6.02).