The Competitive Edge: Does Competition Belong in the Classroom?

Creating a Happy Class

When my new coworker told me, only a few days into my first teaching job, that ours was a “Happy School”, I was embarrassed to tell her I had no idea what she was talking about. Knowing what I know now, there was no reason to have been embarrassed. I was new to the job (and the country, for that matter), but it wasn’t that strange that I hadn’t heard of Happy Schools, regardless - they were still pretty new to South Korea, too.

Only a few years earlier, in 2013, an OECD report had emerged, revealing that Korean fifteen-year-olds were the unhappiest among all 38 member countries. And that wasn’t the only trophy bestowed by the OECD - South Korea had the highest suicide rate, as well. Experts and parents alike pointed fingers at the hyper-competitive education system, which puts intense pressure on young Koreans, and often deprives them of free time to relax or pursue extracurricular interests,

So, in response, the Korean government had introduced the Happiness Education Policy, and a number of schools throughout the country became designated “Happy Schools”. These were predominantly schools that had had issues with low academic performance, or high rates of school violence, and the new program was meant to focus on students’ social and emotional well-being, with a stated aim of reversing this trend.

The hyper-competitive education system puts intense pressure on young Koreans. Image by jcomp on Freepik

I didn’t know all this history this back in 2015, when I started working at my Happy School, though. I just knew what my school had told me. That the classroom dynamic was to be caring, and the lessons should be focused on student interest rather than academic performance. And, they emphasized, not competitive.

I’m not going to lie, my immediate reaction upon hearing about competition-free classrooms was kind of a skeptical one. No competitive activities struck me as a bit extreme. And if that’s your first reaction, too, I get it, Competition is an inevitable part of life, and not necessarily a bad one. Personally, I thrived under academic competition growing up - for me, it was a confidence builder, it was a motivator, and it taught me that life rewards hard work. Plus, winning is fun.

But watching the parade of students through my English classroom those first few years of teaching, I started to reconsider my position. It wasn’t just that the kids seemed to be learning effectively; they were all enthusiastically participating in class. Even the students who struggled the most academically were invested in my lessons. They were collaborative and supportive of each other. And, I observed, there was far less bullying going on in the school than I remembered from my own school days. Particularly noteworthy was the fact that all this was in a school that had presumably been identified as at risk for school violence and low academic performance.

I started to reevaluate. Maybe, it occurred to me, I had been thinking about academic competition from the wrong perspective. It wasn’t just about the advantages and disadvantages of competition, but also the dynamic that arises in its absence - when you can’t use competitive activities as a teacher, your alternative is collaborative ones.

When you can’t use competitive activities as a teacher, your alternative is collaborative ones. Image by Artem Kniaz on Unsplash.

And I had another thought, too, that maybe instead of remembering how good it feels to win, I also needed to remember how it feels to lose. And not just to lose, but to know every time, before the competition even starts, that you have no chance. of succeeding.

I do kind of know what that’s like, because, well…. I was pretty bad at P.E. I didn’t hate running around, or being active, but I was a small kid and a late bloomer. I got picked last for pretty much every team, and I lost a lot. That was demoralizing, but it wasn’t the losing in itself that was the biggest problem. It was instead that the emphasis on competition had taught me that the point of Physical Education was to win. And because I couldn’t win, no matter how hard I tried, I determined that there was no point in me doing P.E. I had lost sight of any value or purpose in physical education for myself, and my diminishing motivation and effort in PE class reflected that. And when I had the choice of opting out of gym class in ninth grade, I jumped at it. I told anyone and everyone that even one required P.E. credit in high school was a waste of our time.

What if, I thought, sitting at my desk in my Happy School one day, what if instead of PE, the thing I had struggled with had been math? Or reading? Or every subject? How would all that losing have impacted me? Would I still have gone to university? Would I still have graduated high school? Academic competition was interesting and motivating to me growing up, sure, but I was good at school. In areas where I struggled, it had had the opposite effect. Competition in PE class hadn’t motivated me, or fostered an interest in athletics - it had demoralized me and pushed me away. And it continued to do so long after I had left school.

Competition in P.E. class hadn’t motivated me - it had demoralized me and pushed me away. Image by Freepik.

That’s not a surprising result, a little internet sleuthing tells me.

Psychosocial theory postulates that children in their primary and junior years are in a developmental phase of Industry vs Inferiority. Children feel the need to win approval by demonstrating their ability to perform tasks that society appears to value, which in turn helps them to develop a sense of pride and self-worth. And while a few losses may be helpful in character-building, if a child feels they cannot develop a specific skill that society demands, they begin to view themselves as inferior, doubting their own abilities, and stifling their potential. If we want children to achieve their full learning potential, it follows, we need to be set them up for success.

And hey - competition can be the way we do that. There’s no question that a fun contest can be a great motivator for certain types of students. There are a few studies that have demonstrated that certain groups, like medical students and debaters, have thrived in a competitive environment (Corell 2018; Mosley-Jensen 2011). And I don’t think we needed any studies to tell us that runners go faster with a rival on their heels (though we got one, anyways - Kilduff 2014).

But I think an important thing to pay attention to when we’re reading these studies is the make-up of these classrooms. Medical students represent some of the most academically gifted individuals, and it is highly probable that they all have a long history of scholarly success. Debate, meanwhile, is inherently an activity that comes with an opponent, and for that reason tends to attract people who enjoy intellectual sparring and competition. The same thing goes with racing - you’re probably not going to take up the sport if you don’t enjoy the race.

There are a few studies that have demonstrated that certain groups, like medical students and debaters, have thrived in a competitive environment. Image by Freepik.

But the average school classroom isn’t like that. Students haven’t self-selected into the activity like debaters or racers, and it’s pretty unlikely that your class will be full of top-performing students like we might see in medical school. So is competition still as effective in that situation?

Well, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that no, competition isn’t the best environment for students who are learning new ideas or practicing new skills.

A 2018 study out of Taiwan found seventh-grade students participating in a non-competitive digital STEM activity performed significantly better on the learning assessment test than peers who had studied the same material in a competitive situation. Discussing the possible reasons for this, researchers noted that students in the non-competitive environment were more likely to read instructions carefully and to seek out additional support to advance a broader conceptual understanding of the material. (Chen et al 2018).

And thinking about it, it makes sense that that would be the case. Competitions have deadlines and time limits, and that often creates a sense of urgency. That would explain why students who are competing might rush through instructions or take less time to learn foundational knowledge - they’re giving themselves more time to perform the competitive task. Not seeking out extra help for the task is also unsurprising in a competitive setting. Since students are competing with one another, they’re not going to turn to fellow students for assistance. And given that it’s a competition, a teacher’s assistance is likely to be seen as cheating or gaining an extra advantage - it wouldn’t be surprising to see students refrain from asking for a teacher’s help, or shame other students for doing so.

Students participating in a non-competitive digital STEM activity were more likely to read instructions carefully and to seek out additional support to advance a broader conceptual understanding of the material than peers in a competitive situation. Image by Pressfoto on FreePik.

That logic might also explain the conclusions of a 2004 study from Hong Kong. In that study, high school students were given a series of easy tasks - some in a competitive situation, and others not. While the study did find the students performed the easy tasks better in the competitive environment, the authors found that “[the competitive group] were more performance-oriented and more likely to sacrifice learning opportunities for better performance”. They also found that, while students generally enjoyed the tasks equally and had similar feelings of accomplishment, students in the competitive group were more susceptible to having worse self-evaluation after a failure. (Lam et al 2004)

Students being overly self-critical wasn’t the only negative collateral consequence of competition I came across, either. A 2018 study about risk aversion compared the behaviour of undergraduates who were being graded normatively (that is to say, on a curve), compared to those who were not. The study found that in the normatively graded classes, students were less likely to lend notes or give assistance to a student who they felt themselves to be in competition with.

An even more significant finding in that vein was an evaluation of seventh and eighth graders in Quebec, which found that although competition could lead to increased academic performance, it also could “also bring out negative affect in students”,. In particular, the authors found that “classroom environments rated high on competition were associated with increased victimization” (Di Stasio et al., 2016). In other words, more competition in the classroom was directly correlated with more bullying.

A 2016 study of seventh and eighth graders found more competition was directly correlated with more bullying. Image by rawpixel on Freepik.

On the other end of the spectrum, a book I found on collaboration in the STEM classroom noted that the undergraduate students in collaborative classrooms formed stronger social bonds, which ultimately made them more likely to complete their degrees and continue with their education. (Gardner and Walters 2015). This is notable because, since competition and collaboration are inherently opposite processes, using competitive activities in the classroom can often come at the expense of using collaborative or cooperative ones.

And there is a lot of evidence about the benefits of collaborative learning. Yes, there is that study I mentioned above that said that medical students thrived in competition. But on the other hand, a study of the grades of second-year medical students by the National Autonomous University of Mexico found students retained information better when they learned in collaborative environments. The study found the grades of students who learned collaboratively to be “significantly higher” than the control group, with authors noting that “the collaborative approach to teaching allowed a more effective understanding of course content, which meant an improved capacity for retention…” (Vázquez-García M. 2018)

And, if you’re willing to consider peer-tutoring collaborative, a study from Dartmouth College found that both tutors and tutees not only developed a better understanding of the material than control students, but further, that they developed more positive attitudes toward the subject matters covered in their tutorial programs. (Cohen, P. et al 1982).

A study found the grades of second-year medical students who learned collaboratively to be “significantly higher” than the control group. Image by Freepik.

One other not-strictly-relevant piece of information that I came across in my research was some suggestion that collaborative work environments were associated with increased worker retention, whereas competitive environments had higher rates of employee turnover. Obviously worker retention isn’t an issue that the average teacher needs to be concerned with, but what it indicated to me was that, while a single competitive contest might be motivating in the short term, a continuously competitive environment might not have the same effect.

Thinking about how this might apply to students made me realize that most of the studies I had read were focused on studying the impact of competition or collaboration on learning in the moment - there was very little discussion about how a continuously competitive classroom dynamic might impact student learning in the long term. That would, admittedly, be a hard thing to measure, but I would be very interested to see what such a study might have to contribute to the conversation.

In the meantime, though, what are we to make of what the current research does say? Does competition belong in the classroom?

Personally, I didn’t come away from my Happy School, or all these studies, feeling like competition is never appropriate in schools. Clearly some students do benefit from competitive activities, and of course, every teaching situation is unique. But I did leave with the conviction that I wanted my own classroom to be a collaborative and supportive environment, where students feel safe to make mistakes, ask questions, and seek assistance when they need it. And I think that that means, in part, moderating the use of competitive activity in the classroom.

For myself, that means being careful not to overuse competition in the classroom. If I’m aiming to build a collaborative classroom environment, then I think the majority of the activities students are doing in a day should reflect that. While I don’t feel there’s an inherent problem with playing Chutes and Ladders, for example, it’s not an exercise that’s generally going to facilitate cooperation, so I limit how often it’s used. The activities I choose for my students are going to steer them towards certain types of behaviour, so I want to make sure that, by and large, I’m choosing activities that encourage the behaviour I want to see.

The activities I choose for my students are going to steer them towards certain types of behaviour, so I want to make sure that, by and large, I’m choosing activities that encourage the behaviour I want to see. Image by Freepik.

I’m also careful about when I use competitive exercises in the classroom. One of the major take-aways I had from the studies I read is that academic performance and learning are two different goals, and more importantly, that they are two different goals that are sometimes in conflict. Most of the studies indicated that competition motivated a better performance, but sometimes at the expense of student learning. So if I am going to use competitive exercises, I use them when students are demonstrating what they’ve already learned, rather than when they’re being introduced to new material. In other words, use cooperative activities to teach, and save competition for review or demonstration.

Finally, because I want a cooperative and supportive environment in my classroom, I came to the conclusion that beyond moderating competition, I also needed to take an active role in facilitating collaboration in its place, by actively choosing to use and emphasize activities where students are encouraged to work together and cooperate.

I hope you enjoyed this post on competition in the classroom! If you liked this, follow along with my Happy Class Series, where I’ll be continuing my research on creating an optimal classroom environment for students. See you there!

References

Burleigh, T. J., & Meegan, D. V. (2018) “Risky prospects and risk aversion tendencies: Does competition in the classroom depend on grading practices and knowledge of peer-status?” Social Psychology of Education: An International Journal.

Chen, C.H., Liu, J.H. & Shou W.C. (2018) “How competition in a Game-based Science Learning Environment Influences Students’ Learning Achievement, Flow Experience, and Learning Behavioral Patterns”. Education Technology & Society.

Cohen, P.A., Kulik, J.A. & Kulik C.L.C. (1982) “Educational Outcomes of Tutoring: A Meta-analysis of Findings”. American Educational Research Journal.

Corell, A. Reguera, L.M. Verdu, E., Verdu M.J. & de Castro J.P. (2018) “Effects of competitive learning tools on medical students: A Case Study”. PLoS One.

Di Stasio, M. R., Savage, R., & Burgos, G. (2016). “Social comparison, competition and teacher student relationships in junior high school classrooms predicts bullying and victimization”. Journal of Adolescence.

Gardner, G.E. & Walters K.L. (2015) Collaborative Teams as a Means of Constructing Knowledge in the Sciences: Theory and Practice.

Kilduff, G. (2014) “Driven to Win: Rivalry, Motivation, and Performance”. Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Lam, S.F., Yim, P.S., Law, J. S.F., & Cheung, R. W.Y. (2004) “The effects of competition on achievement motivation in Chinese classrooms”. British Journal of Educational Psychology.

Mosley-Jensen, W.E. (2011) “Competition as Education: Bringing the Tournament to the Classroom” .Contemporary Argumentation & Debate..

Vázquez-García M. (2018) “Collaborative-group testing improves learning and knowledge retention of human physiology topics in second-year medical students”. Advances in Physiological Education.