RONALD A. BERK, PhD, Professor Emeritus
Biostatistics and Measurement
The Johns Hopkins University

Teaching

Ron served as Assistant Dean for Teaching from 1997 to 2003.  He has taught for 30 years at Johns Hopkins, 11 years in the School of Education and 19 in the School of Nursing, where he has mentored numerous faculty and hundreds of students, all of whom unfortunately are still in prison or on probation. To date, he has taught 170 courses and inflicted statistical pain on nearly 6000 students at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels. He also served as the chair or a member of 90 doctoral dissertation committees in education, psychology, nursing, public health, and religion.

Research

Ron has destroyed scores of trees and shrubbery by publishing more than 130 journal articles and chapters in educational, psychological, and healthcare measurement, and humor, plus 11 books.  His most recent book is Thirteen Strategies to Measure College Teaching (Stylus, 2006).  He wrote the textbook, Screening and Diagnosis of Children with Learning Disabilities, and has edited five “serious” books on criterion-referenced measurement, performance assessment, item and test bias, and program evaluation.  His most recent book on humor is Humor as an Instructional Defibrillator: Evidence-based Techniques in Teaching and Assessment (Stylus, 2002). It is the sequel to Professors Are from Mars, Students Are from Snickers (reprinted by Stylus, 2003).  During 2000, he wrote a monthly humor column, “Ask Mister Humor Person,” for health professionals in the newsletter MedWorldNEWS.

Presentations

He has given more than 270 conference presentations, including 80 keynote/plenary addresses and 190 training sessions and research presentations.  Some of these on humor in college teaching and assessment have recently been presented at national/ international conferences, such as the Erma Bombeck Conference on Popular American Humor, International Society for Humor Studies Conference, International Humor Project Conference on the Positive Power of Humor and Creativity, Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor Conference, Lilly Conference on College Teaching, Canadian Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and Association for Medical Education in Europe Conference. The quality of Ron’s publications above and these presentations reflects his life-long commitment to mediocrity and his professional motto: "Go for the Bronze!"

Awards and Honors

In 2005, Ron was given the Distinguished Reviewer Award by the Buros Institute of Mental Measurements in recognition of his scholarly contributions. He received the University's Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award in 1993 and Caroline Pennington Award for Teaching Excellence in 1997.  Ron was inducted as a Fellow in the Oxford Society of Scholars in 1998.  Since that date, he has been in the Federal Witness Protection Program twice, but still living in Maryland under the name Puffy Snoop M & M.  He’s listed in Who’s Not Who in America. 

Professional Associations

Ron served as a member of the board of directors of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor from 2003-2005.  He is a past president of the National Council on Measurement in Education and served on the Council's Board of Directors for six  years. Ron was recently excommunicated from the Council for “not being serious.” He is now being required to complete 100 days of community service at a local comedy club before review for reinstatement.

Speaking Availability

 Ron is available to speak on a variety of topics related to teaching and assessment, including: humor in the classroom and in professional presentations, test development and testing issues (especially NCLB), faculty evaluation methods, portfolios, and rating scale construction. Professional venues include: conferences, workshops, retreats, business meetings, commencements, picnics, and cruises. Audiences include: teachers (K-12), college professors, and trainers; physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals; administrators and business leaders; and livestock. For sample abstracts of presentations, go to abstracts and www.muohio.edu/lillyconference (and then click Featured Presenters).

Ron’s Untold Story, Until Now!

Ron has NOT been a stand-up comedian, musician, singer, or Broadway performer. However, as the son of a Radio City Rockette and dance teacher, he began dancing on stage at age 4. He planned a career as a dancer and choreographer in the tradition of Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett on Broadway until the Vietnam War erupted. There were no dancing deferments. While at Johns Hopkins, he even auditioned for the national touring company of A Chorus Line, which was a truly humbling experience (Triple pirouettes in both directions? Are you kidding me? Nureyev I’m not!). It was back to teaching statistics.

Prior to his long teaching stint at Hopkins, Ron taught elementary and junior high school for 4 years in the Washington DC School System and served as a testing specialist for 3 years in the Montgomery County (MD) School System.

He has always used humor spontaneously in teaching and in life situations. So how were all of the systematic humor teaching techniques created? After teaching for 11 years in the School of Education, he moved to the medical institutions at Hopkins for a midlife jolt. As the only non-nurse and male in the School of Nursing, Ron taught all of the undergraduate and graduate statistics courses. Unfortunately, as he began teaching, he soon realized his limitations in the clinical area. On a scale of 0–10, his clinical skills, rounded to six decimal points, were rated a big goose egg 0. The challenge was developing in-class and homework statistics problems with applications in clinical practice and research.

Ron’s solution (Bet you can’t wait to hear this. Are you on the edge of your recliner?) was to: Make them up. Yup, that’s it. Drawing on his extremely fertile imagination and twisted mind, he created humorous diseases, medications, body parts, and strange clinical trials to test the students’ abilities to apply the statistics. As a daily change of pace from the super-serious courses in pharmacology, pathophysiology, psychopathology, and every other clinicalology, the students loved those problems. The students kept laughing and Ron kept adding more and more humor into his teaching. Soon he included humor in the syllabus, handouts, examples, reviews, and test items. And the trajectory of his career changed forever. Clearly, Ron admits that the humor was created to cover up his incompetence in clinical knowledge. This cover-up was successful for 19 years, until his retirement. Not bad!!