在线学习环境中教师幽默对学习投入的影响:一个多水平的结构方程分析

Instructors’ Humor and College Students’ Academic Engagement in Online Learning:A Multilevel Analysis

以教学幽默风格模型(instructional humor styles)和教学幽默加工理论(instructional humor processing theory)为基础,通过构建多水平的结构方程模型探索在线学习环境中教师幽默与学习投入关系。结果表明:(1)在教师视角下,与课堂相关,与课堂无关,自我贬低和攻击性的幽默对学习投入没有显著影响;(2)在学生视角,仅学生感知的与课堂相关的教师幽默正向影响学习投入;(3)学生感知的与课堂相关,与课堂无关和攻击性的教师幽默均能通过积极情绪和消极情绪对学习投入产生影响。此外,自我贬低的教师幽默仅通过消极情绪对学习投入产生作用。本研究首次将教学幽默风格理论模型拓展至在线学习环境中,从教师视角和学生视角验证了该理论在我国的适应性。此外,本研究验证了教学幽默加工理论,揭示了教师幽默对学习投入的内在机制,这对改善在线学习环境中学生的学习投入具有一定的指导意义。

Instructors’ humor is one of the effective teaching strategies to promote academic engagement.Specifically,humor can create a relaxing learning environment against the negative effects of anxiety and build positive teacher-student relationships to actively involve students in learning activities.However,instructor humor is a multidimensional concept consisting of humor related to course content,humor unrelated to course content,self-disparaging,and aggressive humor.Less attention is paid towards how different styles of humor have effects on academic engagement systematically.In addition,existing studies primarily focused on the single perspective,instructors’ perspectives(instructor humor),or students’ perspectives(perceiving instructor humor),which ignores the transmission effect of humor and the possibility of major changes in humor at the class level.Notably,according to instructional humor processing theory,academic emotion may be a potential mediator between different styles of humor and academic engagement.However,it still remains unclear how different styles of humor influence academic engagement through academic emotion.To address those gaps,the present study aimed to investigate the relationships between different styles of instructors’ humor on students’ online academic engagement and its underlying mechanism from instructors’ perspectives and students’ perspectives.The present study recruited 1829 college students in 49 classes from 22 universities of 9 provinces in China.Instructors voluntarily and anonymously completed instructors’ humor scales and students filled out perceiving instructors’ humor,academic emotion,and academic engagement scales.All the measures from instructor and students’ perspectives had good reliability and validity.The ICCs of behavior,emotional and cognitive engagement were.051,.078,and.069.Finally,the present study conducted a multilevel structural equation analysis to estimate direct and indirect effects.The results revealed that:(1) At the class level,instructors’ humor had no impact on students’ academic engagement in online learning.(2) At the individual level,perceiving humor related to course content significantly predicts academic engagement,while perceiving unrelated to course content,self-disparaging and aggressive humor had no effect on academic engagement.(3) Academic emotion could not mediate the relationship between different styles of instructor humor and students’ academic engagement.(4) Positive and negative emotions had mediating effects between perceiving related to course content,unrelated to course content,aggressive humor,and academic engagement.While perceiving self-disparaging humor could affect academic engagement through negative emotion.Different from previous research that focused on face-to-face learning environments,this study further explores the effects of different styles of humor on academic engagement systematically in online learning.In addition,the current study conducts a multilevel model and analyzes the effects of humor from the individual level and class level,which contributes to having a comprehensive understanding of how instructors’ humor facilitates academic engagement in online learning.In addition,the present study provides empirical evidence for instructor humor processing theory and firstly found the mediating role of academic emotion between different styles of instructors’ humor and academic engagement.In practice,instructors should generate humor related to course content and topics from students’ perspectives,and avoid using unrelated to course humor,self-disparaging,and aggressive humor as possible as they could in online learning environments.