Applying Humor to Homework. Good or Bad?
To some students, homework can feel more like a chore than a learning experience. In some cases students will not even finish the entire assignment. We believe the problem is that the students are not engaged enough and instead become bored and quit. Our attempted solution to this problem was to infuse humor into the assignment problems to attempt to keep their interest long enough for them to complete the problem set. Using ASSISTments to test our theory, six Skill Builder problem sets were created, each one covering a different high school math topic. The first three problem sets had a comic in the body of each problem (Humor in Problem or HIP), while the second set (Humor Out of Problem or HOP) had a comic after every problem. In every problem set students were required to get three math problems correct in a row to complete it. The two types of problem sets were created to simultaneously test the effect of having a distraction inside of the problem compared to having the distraction outside of the problem. Data was collected from students over a four month period where some problem sets had a large sample size and while others had very few. From this small set of data we were able to come to the conclusion that putting distractions inside or outside the problems resulted in longer completion times for students while not increasing completion rate. Although these are the results from the data we collected, the problem sets will continue to be used so that more data can be collected for future study.
Humor in Problem (HIP)
Permutations and Combinations:
Finding Expected Value:
Conditional Probability:
Humor Outside of Problem (HOP)
Understanding Vocab About Circles:
Proving Simple Geometric Theorems:
Law of Sines and Cosines: