Abstract: Instructors humor is one of the effective teaching strategies. Using humor helps instructors to create a relaxing and interesting online learning climate, keep positive instructor-student relationships, and attract students to learn. In the past few decades, a plethora of empirical research has shown that humor was related to students’ academic engagement in online environment. Notably, there were several limits. First, instructor humor is a multidimensional concept, however, little is know about 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. Third, although instructional humor processing theory could effectively explain how instructor humor affect learning, empirical evidence still remains scarce. To address those gaps, the present studies aimed to investigate the relationships between different styles of instructors humor on students’ online academic engagement and its underlying mechanism from the individual level and the class level. One thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine college students and forty nine instructors were recruited from 22 universities of 9 provinces in China. All participants voluntarily and anonymously completed perceiving instructors humor, instructors humor, academic emotion and academic engagement scales. Meanwhile, at class level, instructors’ age, gender, seniority and size of class were collected. Students’ demographic information including gender and age were obtained. The ICCS of academic engagement at class level was .89. In addition, the present study conducted a multilevel structural equation analysis to simultaneously estimate direct and indirect effects in the case of clustered data. The results revealed that: (1) Instructors humor at class level was unrelated to students academic engagement in online learning. (2) At individual level, perceiving humor related to course content was significantly related to academic engagement, while perceiving unrelated to course content, self-disparaging and aggressive humor were irrelevant to academic engagement. (3) Academic emotion can not mediate the relationship between different styles of instructor humor and students academic engagement. (4) Positive and negative emotion 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. Compared to previous research, this study further explores how different styles of humor have an influence on academic engagement in online learning. Moreover, the current study conducts a multilevel model and analyzes effects of humor from individual level and class level, which contributes to have a comprehensive understanding of how instructors’ humor facilitates academic engagement. Additionally, the present study provides empirical evidence for instructor humor processing theory and examines the mediating role of academic emotion. In practice, instructors should generate humor related to course content from students’ perspectives, and avoid unrelated to course humor, self-disparaging and aggressive humor as possible as they could.

Key words: instructors humor, academic engagement, academic emotion, online learning, multilevel analysis.

摘要： 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）教师幽默与学习投入无显著相关；（2）在学生层面，仅学生感知的与课堂相关的教师幽默与学习投入呈显著正相关；（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，从教师层面和学生层面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。

关键词: 教师幽默 学习投入 学业情绪 在线学习 多水平中介效应