Humor in social studies teaching

In the Turkish Language Council Dictionary, humour is defined as a kind of speech or writing which describes some thoughts by embellishing them with wit, jokes and leg pullings. Humour that has covered every point of society and can be used in every situation exists at home, in work places and everywhere that there are people.Humour is not only a means which makes people obtain different points of view in many issues ,but it is also a means which shows more than one aspect of many events or matters . In other words, the aim of using humour is not only to make people enjoy themselves and laugh. Besides, humour is used to make people informed, to reveal and teach different points of view and dimensions. A joke or any item of humour that is made in the intervals of long-term studies and boring atmospheres increases productive studies and renders individuals happy as well as causing courses to become more functional and productive via the use of humour in the classroom. In addition to that humour makes lessons taught and studies more productive, it has an important role in relationships between individuals because of its positively contributing to especially teacher-student rapport. In this study, it is tried to determine the effects of the use of humour in Social Studies courses on students? academic success and attitudes. For this purpose, an experimental study is carried out with pretest-posttest, experiment and control group. The students of experiment group are administered activities based on humour items , on the subjects taught, in the unit of ?Life on Earth? in the course of grade 6 Social Studies. The period of survey is limited to the period of the unit, Life on Earth, and the application process in the experiment group is administered by the researcher in person. A success test that measures academic success to attain data in the study and an Attitude Scale to measure the attitudes of students towards Social Studies course are administered. The success test is tested on its currency and reliability by being prepared in a way to meet the related the benefits of unit by the researcher. At the end of the study, significant differences come to light among the students of experiment and control group , academic success and the attitudes of Social Studies course. Significant differences are determined in favor of the experiment group in proportion to the control group after the statistical procedures carried out to determine the source of this difference. This difference is thought to result from the instruction done with activities containing humour. Besides, significant suggestions are presented for the instruction of Social Studies and studies to be done in this study, as based on literature and findings.