Examining the Effect of Sense of Humor on Self-Efficacy: an Exploration of English Teachers’ beliefs in Aviation University

The idea that those teachers having self-efficacy are more influential and more successful than other teachers who lack this characteristic has been a challenging topic. Sense of humor as a key factor for increasing self-efficacy has been overlooked by some scholars in the field of education. Regarding these contradictory issues, this study was an attempt to investigate the effects of sense of humor on teacher’s self- efficacy and was sparked by dissatisfaction of some teachers practicing humor in school environments. For this purpose, English teachers completed two questionnaires on humor and self-efficacy. Items on the humor scale involved four dimensions including humor creation, social humor, humor used to cope, and humor attitudes. Further, self-efficacy items included three dimensions of classroom performance such as instructional strategies, student engagement, and classroom management. Correlation and multiple regression analyses revealed a positive relationship between sense of humor and teacher self-efficacy. The high amount of correlation was observed between social humor and efficacy in instructional strategies while the correlation between social humor and classroom management was not satisfactory. Finally, analyzing the questions in background questionnaire indicated that the stress factor played a significant role in decreasing the instructional strategy efficacy. Therefore, instructional use of humor can be considered as a hot topic for professional development and teacher training programs.

Keywords:

Sense of humor , self-efficacy , teachers’ beliefs