A Journey Through A Quantitative Reasoning Course with Quirkiness and Laughter

Da Yang TAN
NUS College

dytan@nus.edu.sg

Tan, D. Y. (2023). A journey through a quantitative reasoning course with quirkiness and laughter [Lightning talk]. In Higher Education Campus Conference (HECC) 2023, 7 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecc2023proceedings/a-journey-through-a-quantitative-reasoning-course-with-quirkiness-and-laughter/

SUB-THEME

Others

KEYWORDS

Humour, motivation, quantitative reasoning

ABSTRACT

As the timeless saying goes, “laughter is the best medicine”. In my latest run of GEA1000N “Quantitative Reasoning with Data” (Ng et al. 2022), I explored the use of humour within my classes as a mediator to engage students from diverse academic backgrounds. As it is known, humour, when used appropriately, creates an engaging and enjoyable learning environment that captures students’ attention and encourages active participation. It helps to alleviate the often-dreaded monotony of lectures, making the content more relatable and memorable (Neumann et al., 2009). Moreover, humour can serve as an effective communication bridge between instructors and students, breaking down barriers and building rapport, thereby fostering a positive and light-hearted classroom atmosphere conducive to learning (Lomax & Moosavi, 2002). Furthermore, discovering humour within the subject requires a profound understanding of the subject matter, and this stimulates students’ higher order thinking towards the subject at hand (Garner, 2006; Ziv, 1988; Daumiller et al., 2020). In this Lightning Talk, I will elaborate on my strategies and approaches to incorporate humour within a technical and quantitative classroom. In the following, I propose three possible levels in which the humour could be implemented:

LEVEL 1000: SLAPSTICK COMEDY TO ATTRACT STUDENTS’ ATTENTION

Figure 1 illustrates an example of attracting students’ attention through the wordplay of established bubble tea chains (another subject that students will be interested in) to encourage the students to look and think about the questions posed to them. The humour at this Level 1000 lowest tier serves as a psychological break from the monotony of the lesson, especially when I attempt to pronounce the names of the chain and when students break into laughter (or at least a sheepish smile). However, it is important to capture the opportunity to broach about a serious subject or the content matter once the attention has been captured.

Lightning Talk Tan Da Yang Fig 1 — *Figure 1.* An example on how wordplay is used to capture students’ attention. (The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products are intended or should be inferred.)

Figure 2 shows a whimsical made-up scenario to get students to start thinking about the validity of using average in a Likert scale. Like the first example, the idea is to capture students’ attention by introducing something that is considered fun for them.

Lightning Talk Tan Da Yang Fig 2 — *Figure 2.* A whimsical hypothetical scenario on bubble tea production for students to think about the correct use of the Likert scale (or to brainstorm new bubble tea flavours).

LEVEL 2000: CONTEXTUALISED HUMOUR TO GET STUDENTS THINKING

Within the course, one of the hardest concepts to grasp in probability is the concept of mutual exclusivity, which refers to the fact that events do not occur at the same time; and independence, in which the occurrence of one event does not affect the chance of occurrence of the other event. To demonstrate the differences, I showed a slide that says:

Mutual exclusivity: Both of you have zero chance of being together.
Independence: The chance of being together has nothing to do with whether you like the person.

The main objective is to contextualise potentially conceptually confusing pain points into ideas that students may appreciate, and then infuse some form of humour to get them to think why the formal definitions could be applied in their personal context, in this case, relationships.

LEVEL 3000: HUMOUR FOR MEMORY RETENTION

To demonstrate what null hypothesis is about, I wore red shirts for six of my lessons, and in the eighth lesson where the concept of hypothesis testing is covered, I asked the class the question as shown in Figure 3. While not all the students selected the correct answer on the first attempt, the act itself was achieved both Level 1000 and Level 2000, and there was ample attention given to myself when I explained the solution. Furthermore, in the last lesson of the course, an informal survey was administered, and students were able to recall and mention the incident, therefore demonstrating some degree of retention.

Lightning Talk Tan Da Yang Fig 3 — *Figure 3.* Building up of a playful narrative over multiple weeks with the aim that students will remember the important concept of null hypothesis in hypothesis testing. (The red shirt was washed every week well before the lesson.)

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Although the use of humour is not new and have been incorporated to varying degrees by instructors, having a framework and discourse that highlights its value as a useful pedagogical strategy would assist in purposefully reflecting on our teaching practices (Bieg & Dresel, 2018). This Lightning Talk aims to precisely provide that by encouraging intentional and deliberate consideration of how humour can be effectively employed in the classroom.

REFERENCES

Bieg, S., & Dresel, M. (2018). Relevance of perceived teacher humor types for instruction and student learning. Social Psychology of Education, 21, 805-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-018-9428-z

Daumiller, M., Bieg, S., Dickhäuser, O., & Dresel, M. (2020). Humor in university teaching: role of teachers’ achievement goals and self-efficacy for their use of content-related humor. Studies in Higher Education, 45(12), 2619-33. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1623772

Garner, R. L. (2006). Humor in pedagogy: How ha-ha can lead to aha! College Teaching, 54(1), 177-80. https://doi.org/10.3200/CTCH.54.1.177-180

Lomax, R. G., & Moosavi, S. A. (2002). Using humor to teach statistics: Must they be orthogonal? Understanding Statistics: Statistical Issues in Psychology, Education, and the Social Sciences, 1(2), 113-30. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15328031US0102_04

Neumann, D. L., Hood, M., & Neumann, M. M. (2009). Statistics? You must be joking: The application and evaluation of humor when teaching statistics. Journal of Statistics Education, 17(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2009.11889525

Ng, K. L., Hartman, K., Gan, M. J., Lu, M., & Tan, S. W. (2022). Data literacy for all: Designing GEA1000 “Quantitative Reasoning with Data” with an eye towards inclusivity [Paper presentation]. Higher Education Campus Conference (HECC) 2022, 7-8 December. National University of Singapore. Retrieved from https://nus.edu.sg/cdtl/engagement/conferences/higher-education-campus-conference-2022/hecc-2022-home/ebooklet.pdf

Ziv, A. (1988). Teaching and learning with humor: Experiment and replication. The Journal of Experimental Education, 57(1), 4-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.1988.10806492