Humor@Senior: Increasing Learners' Classroom Performance

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Choosing an effective teaching and learning strategy in Mathematics is not an easy task. Strategies need to be chosen carefully in order to contribute the most effectivelyto student learning. The teacher uses different teaching strategies but still, students are not participating in classroom discussion especially in mathematics subject. In this study, the researcher focused specifically on student participation in the classroom and its effect on classroom performance. The researcher also wanted to know the reasons why students do not participate in the classroom discussion.

METHODS

To describe the reasons for students' non-participating in the classroom discussions and todescribe the percentage of students about the infusion of humor in the pedagogy of teaching basic calculus percentage method was used. Weighted mean and standard deviation were used to describe the mean score of the pre-test and post-test. Percent of the increase was used to find out the percent increase between the pre-test and post-test. t-test was used to test if there is any significant difference between the pre-test and post-test of the students.

RESULTS

The result in the checklist revealed that thestudents' reason why they did not participate in classroom discussion were as follows: they fear that they will look unintelligent to their classmates and teacher; their ideas were not formulated enough. The result of pre-test and the post-test showed that thirty-seven (37) out of forty-three (43) or 86.05% of the students improved and learned the selected topics discussed and an increase of knowledge about the selected topics was also evidently achieved. Comparing the results of their pre-test and post-test 76.29% increase in the post-test was computed. The result was way beyond the expected 75% increase. Paired t-test also revealed that the difference between the pre-test score and the post-test score was significantly different from the computed paired t-test of -17.5904 is beyond the critical value of ±2.018, regardless of the sign at 0.05 level of significance. Thus, it can be concluded that the students gained a significant increase in knowledge of the selected topics discussed. In other words, the students significantly learned the lesson taught.

DISCUSSIONS

A survey was conducted to find out the students' perception of infusing humor in teaching. The students strongly agreed that they felt that a teacher is more interesting to listen when he is funny and students can have a bigger chance of relating to the discussion if the teacher is funny. They also agreed that both the teacher and students should be careful with humor so as not to hurt anyone's feelings. Moreover, they also agreed that if there is something funny in the discussion they more likely to pay attention. A sign of unanimous admittance that humor increases their interest and motivates them to engage in the classroom discussion was very much evident from the responses made by the students.After the findings, other teachers teaching other subject was recommended to use humor in pedagogy to test its effectiveness to other learning areas.