Humor in university teaching: role of teachers’ achievement goals and self-efficacy for their use of content-related humor

ABSTRACT

Teachers’ content-related humor matters for the quality of higher education. However, little is known about the circumstances under which teachers use it. From a socio-cognitive perspective, teachers’ achievement goals and self-efficacy appear to be relevant personal precursors. We investigated their effects on content-related humor in two studies. In Study 1, 229 teachers (79 female; 159 PhDs; 33 full professors) participated with 387 courses while 10,296 students assessed the humor in these courses. Study 2 used a similar design for 45 teachers (20 female; 27 PhDs, 9 full professors), 116 course sessions, and 2,333 student assessments. Three-level-analyses pointed to substantial variance in students’ assessments of content-related humor which could be attributed to differences between courses/sessions within teachers (ICC = .12–.13) and between teachers themselves (ICC = .21). In both studies, performance (appearance component) avoidance goals emerged as negative predictors, and relational goals and self-efficacy as positive predictors of content-related humor, highlighting the relevance of instructors’ motivations for the use of instructional humor.

KEYWORDS:

• Humor
• higher education teaching
• instruction
• achievement goals
• self-efficacy
• motivation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Specifically, for Study 1 our analyses are based on the dataset reported in Daumiller et al. (2016), and for Study 2 we used data from the first measurement point and the first cohort of a larger study by Daumiller et al. (2019). All data and codes that support the findings of this study are provided in an open access repository (https://osf.io/qzbj8). To confirm that the sample sizes were adequate for the investigation at hand, we conducted power analyses (using MLPowSim; Browne, Lahi, and Marker [2009]). We used conservative settings based on the data and the intended analyses and found that at least 37 instructors were required to detect the effects of the variables on level 2.

Additional information

Funding

The study presented in this paper was funded by a grant from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) Grant to Markus Dresel (DR 454/8-1) and to Oliver Dickhäuser (DI 929/5-1).