Appendix (for reading content...etc)
Read the passage 'Competition in the Classroom'. On a piece of paper, take notes on the main points of the reading passage.
Reading time: 3 minutes
Competition in the Classroom
Although cooperation is currently the most popular paradigm in classrooms, competition has a number of advantages. Research on classrooms in which competition is encouraged has demonstrated that competition can increase motivation and productivity while students are having fun.
Competition has long been used in classrooms to motivate students, encouraging them to do their best work. Like athletes who improve when they train with others who are equal or superior performers, students tend to improve in a competitive learning setting. Considerable evidence suggests that motivation is especially enhanced among high achieving students in a competitive classroom.
One of the main advantages of competition is that it creates an environment in which students push each other to excel and thereby increase productivity. For example, in classrooms where students compete to read the most books, the total number of books that each student reads increases as compared with classrooms without similar competitive goals.
Perhaps because competition has long been associated with sports and games, it is fun for students. Teachers often use team-based competitions to make academic material more interesting and entertaining. Some common examples are spelling bees, science project competitions, and group quizzes in which teams answer questions and receive points for correct answers. Competition is useful when an otherwise uninteresting lesson is presented as a game. Most would agree that playing is more enjoyable than memorizing by rote for the big test. In fact, students who participate in the Science Olympiad, a national competitive event, report that the main reason for joining the team is to have fun.
Now listen to the passage. On a piece of paper, take notes on the main points of the listening passage.
[audio|src:'\listening\toefl_advanced\ClassroomCompetition.mp3'|wait:185]
Although it's claimed that competition in the classroom plays an important role in academic achievement, today we'll challenge the assumptions that competition is good for students. First of all, competition supposedly provides motivation, but in well-documented research, competitive classrooms can cause high degrees of performance anxiety, which actually interferes with learning and impedes the goal of motivation. Increased instances of cheating, fear of failure, antagonism among students, and low self-esteem also tend to increase in highly competitive educational settings.
A second assumption is that competition increases productivity, but in an analysis of 122 studies on this topic, Alfie Kohn found that cooperation promoted higher productivity than competition in about half of the studies, and 25 percent of the studies didn't discriminate between productivity in cooperative and competitive cases. In numerous studies since, the benefits of cooperative learning, or the structuring of groups to work together in the classroom, has confirmed the increase in productivity that accompanies a focus on group goals.
The assumption that competition is fun may have been true in the past, when emphasis was placed on the process, that is, playing the game. But in contemporary society, the emphasis seems to have changed. Children are so dedicated to winning the game, that the spontaneous fun is often lost in the contest. Even sports competitions have become all about the outcome. And losers don't have nearly as much fun as winners.
So here's my solution: why not retain all of the good aspects of competition by allowing students to compete against themselves? Instead of a situation in which one person wins because he's read the most books-everyone wins because each child has read more books this term than he or she did last term? See what I mean?
Summarize the main points in the lecture, and then explain how they cast doubt on the ideas in the reading passage.
|
competition in the classroom challenge assumptions
|
|
motivation
|
|
train like athletes
high achievers especially
|
performance anxiety
cheating, fear, antagonism
low self esteem
|
|
productivity
|
|
push each other
EX compete to read most books
à all read more
|
Kohn 122 studies
Cooperation higher
Productivity ½
No diff ¼
|
|
fun
|
|
games, sports
more interest + entertain
spell bees, science proj, group quiz
science Olympiad = fun
|
past = play, present = win
fun for winners
better compete against self
|
|