No Contest: The Case Against Competition

by Alfie Kohn

  49. Thomas L. Good et al., “Using Work-Groups in Mathematics Instruction,” p. 60. I am indebted to Judy Clarke for her incisive analysis of role assignments.

  50. Slavin, “Cooperative Learning and Student Achievement,” p. 31.

  51. Johnson and Johnson, Learning Together and Alone, pp. 134, 143.

  52. See Yael Sharan and Shlomo Sharan, “Group Investigation Expands Cooperative Learning,” and virtually anything else written by either of them.

  53. The best known of these programs is the Child Development Project, for information about which see Daniel Solomon et al., “Cooperative Learning as Part of a Comprehensive Program Designed to Promote Prosocial Development”; chapter 6 of my book The Brighter Side of Human Nature; or my article “The ABC’s of Caring.”

  54. See, for example, Mark Brubacher et al., eds., Perspectives on Small Group Learning, the contributors to which repeatedly show how children learn by talking, and the work of Judy Clarke in Canada, Helen Cowie and Jean Rudduck in England, and Joan Dalton in Australia, among many others.

  55. Together, in Mara Sapon-Shevin and Nancy Schniedewind, “Selling Cooperative Learning Without Selling It Short”; separately, in Schniedewind and Ellen Davidson’s excellent guidebook for teachers, Cooperative Learning, Cooperative Lives, and in Sapon-Shevin’s “Cooperative Learning, Cooperative Visions.”

  56. See my article “Group Grade Grubbing versus Cooperative Learning” and a forthcoming book tentatively titled Punished by Rewards.

  57. Nastasi and Clements point out that in all the studies purporting to show that rewards are necessary for learning to occur, CL was basically glued on to “traditional classroom structures which are individualistic and competitive in orientation” (“Research on Cooperative Learning,” p. 123). For additional criticisms of the claim that CL yields achievement gains only if extrinsic motivators are present, see my article “Group Grade Grubbing versus Cooperative Learning.”

  58. Spencer Kagan notes that his “structural” method of CL shares with Slavin’s approach “an emphasis on specific behaviors among teachers” as opposed to “general principles” of cooperation or collaboration (Brandt, “On Cooperative Learning,” p. 10). While I am not aware of any CL theorist or researcher who makes the connection explicitly, anyone who relies on extrinsic incentives to get children to cooperate might very well rely on extrinsic incentives to get teachers to use CL; concepts like merit pay are quite consistent with this paradigm.

  59. Leann Lipps Birch et al., “Eating as the ‘Means’ Activity in a Contingency.” The experimenters did not expect to find that verbal rewards would have precisely the same motivation-killing effects as tangible rewards.

  60. “In STAD or TGT [two of the student team learning methods developed at Johns Hopkins University], learning and cooperating are the means; the goal is winning,” observed Spencer Kagan (“Co-op Co-op,” p. 439). The third edition of a book describing these methods (Robert E. Slavin, Using Student Team Learning) begins with the announcement that “competition between teams is no longer recommended” (p. 1). This is particularly remarkable for two reasons: first, the reason given for this shift is not a change of heart or mind on the part of the author but a growing resistance to the technique on the part of educators themselves: “The same teachers who are attracted to cooperative learning are often repelled by moving competition up to the team level” (p. 1). Second, notwithstanding this comment in the introduction, the manual proceeds to set out the rules for how “students compete” in the tournaments (p. 24; see also Slavin, Cooperative Learning, chap. 4).

  61. Teresa M. Amabile and Judith Gitomer, “Children’s Artistic Creativity.” For more evidence of, and a theoretical basis for, the auspicious effects of autonomy, see the work of Edward L. Deci, including his book with Richard M. Ryan, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior.

  62. Shlomo Sharan, “Cooperative Learning and Helping Behaviour in the Multi-ethnic Classroom,” p. 158.

  63. Yael Sharan and Shlomo Sharan, “Group Investigation Expands Cooperative Learning,” p. 20.

  64. These remarks were part of a speech delivered at the second annual cooperative learning conference in 1986. See Shlomo Sharan, “Cooperative Learning: Problems and Promise,” p. 4. Striking a similar theme, Mara Sapon-Shevin writes that instead of wondering “What cooperative learning method will increase student test scores?” we might ask “What kinds of cooperative learning methods and practice best allow students to experience control over their own learning and learn to make meaningful decisions related to their own education and that of others?” (“Cooperative Learning, Cooperative Visions,” pp. 26–27).

  65. For discussions of task characteristics that tap and promote intrinsic interest, see Thomas W. Malone and Mark R. Lepper, “Making Learning Fun,” and Raymond J. Wlodkowski and Judith H. Jaynes, Eager to Learn.

  66. Elizabeth G. Cohen, Designing Groupwork, p. 69. Cohen emphasizes that the curriculum, besides being interesting, must be structured so that different kinds of abilities are necessary for success. This allows everyone to make a contribution, which in turn reduces the differences in status that students represent in each other’s eyes. (See also Cohen, “Continuing to Cooperate.”)

  67. For example, Spencer Kagan has remarked that his “structural” version of CL “shares with David and Roger Johnson’s approach the idea of giving teachers new methods so they can teach whatever they want to teach more successfully. It’s curriculum free; the choice of a structure does not involve choice of any particular curriculum or curriculum materials.” (Ron Brandt, “On Cooperative Learning,” p. 10).

  68. Mara Sapon-Shevin, “Cooperative Learning: Liberatory Praxis or Hamburger Helper?”

  69. “I’m often depressed, however, to see these methods [Student Teams-Achievement Divisions and Teams-Games-Tournaments] applied to subjects that lend themselves more to discussion and controversy” (Robert E. Slavin, “Here to Stay—Or Gone Tomorrow?” p. 5).

  70. Sapon-Shevin and Schniedewind, “Selling Cooperative Learning Without Selling It Short.” Also see Eric Schaps and Catherine Lewis, “Extrinsic Rewards Are Education’s Past, Not Its Future.”

  71. For one of many criticisms, see D. Monty Neill and Noe J. Medina, “Standardized Testing: Harmful to Educational Health.” For reactions to the prospect of expanding such tests, see Susan Chira, “Prominent Educators Oppose National Tests.” Some criticize these exams for various methodological flaws that limit their usefulness at doing even what they claim to do. I am more concerned with their inherent limits, the misconceived purposes for which they were designed. The only legitimate reason to evaluate students, I would argue, is to help them learn more effectively. Tests that sort children like so many potatoes—or that are intended to serve as extrinsic motivators for studying (or teaching)—ultimately interfere with a meaningful education.

  72. See my book The Brighter Side of Human Nature and some of the more than 600 sources cited therein.

  73. For that matter, the project also places special emphasis on the quality of the curriculum and on giving students more control over their learning—all of which have moved the project’s designers away from relying on punishments or rewards. For details, see the sources listed in note 53 above.

  74. See my article “Caring Kids: The Role of the Schools.”

  75. Sapon-Shevin and Schniedewind, “Selling Cooperative Learning Without Selling It Short,” p. 64.

  76. Nan and Ted Graves, “Sue Smith: The Child Development Project in Action,” p. 12.

  77. Steven A. Gelb, “On Being Cooperative in Noncooperative Places,” pp. 1–2. For a useful guide to implementing college-level CL, see David W. Johnson et al., Active Learning.

  78. Daniel Solomon et al., “Creating a Caring Community,” pp. 13, 29.

  79. See Paul Cobb et al., “Assessment of a Problem-Centered Second-Grade Mathematics Project”; and Erna Yackel et al., “Small-Group interactions as a Source of Learning Opportunities in
Second-Grade Mathematics.” (The quotation is from the latter article, p. 394). Children in the project classroom were also less motivated to be superior to their peers—further corroboration of the argument that excellence and competition tend to pull in opposite directions. In third grade, project students were plunged back into the conventional textbook-based approach to learning math. Nevertheless, those who had spent the preceding year in constructivist, cooperative classrooms continued to score higher than the others on conceptually challenging tasks (Paul Cobb et al., “A Follow-Up Assessment of a Second-Grade Problem-Centered Mathematics Project”).

  80. Most of the opposition to CL comes from individuals put off by the very idea of teaching children to cooperate. One academic psychologist told a reporter that cooperative learning should be opposed because it “goes against the American grain. . . . Education should prepare kids for life in a particular culture. In reality the name of the game is dog eat dog.” (Barbara Foorman quoted in William J. Warren, “New Movement Seeks to Replace Rivalry in Class With Team Spirit.”) The closest thing to organized opposition comes from advocates for special programs for “gifted” children, who bolster what they see as their underdog status by wildly overstating the popularity of CL. “In the [current] climate, marshalling an argument against cooperative learning is an unpopular, if not risky position” is how one writer prefaces her attack (Ann Robinson, “Cooperation or Exploitation?” p. 9).

  81. See, for example, Samuel Totten et al., Cooperative Learning: A Guide to Research, and the September 1990 issue of Cooperative Learning magazine. The March 1987 issue of the IASCE newsletter (precursor to the magazine) is devoted to the academic roots of CL, with articles on the work of Lewin, Deutsch, Dewey, and others.

  82. Scott Willis, “Coop. Learning Shows Staying Power,” p. 1. The article appeared on the front page of the newsletter of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

  83. Considerable research has demonstrated the academic and psychological peril in this widespread practice. Ability grouping does not respond to differences in what children can learn so much as it creates differences in what they will learn. (The indispensable source on this topic is Jeannie Oakes’s Keeping Track. For a summary of other empirical research, see my book You Know What They Say . . ., pp. 163–66, 223.) The sensible response to tracking, however, is not simply to dump students of widely varying achievement levels into one classroom but to provide the opportunity for them to engage in structured heterogeneous interaction.

  84. AAAS report excerpt quoted in Susan F. Wooley et al., “BSCS Cooperative Learning and Science Program,” p. 32.

  85. “Small groups provide a forum for asking questions, discussing ideas, making mistakes, learning to listen to others’ ideas, offering constructive criticism, and summarizing discoveries in writing” (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics, p. 87).

  86. See Elizabeth Culotta, “The Calculus of Education Reform.” In a cooperative and conceptual approach to teaching calculus to students at Duke University and elsewhere, “much of their grade depends on co-authored written reports,” which means that “students have to collaborate during lab and outside class. And so they befriend each other” (p. 1061).

  87. The recommendation quoted here is taken from a pamphlet entitled “The English Coalition Conference: Assumptions, Aims, and Recommendations of the Secondary Strand,” distributed by the NCTE. The 1988 anthology, Focus on Collaborative Learning, was edited by Jeff Golub and the National Council of Teachers of English Committee on Classroom Practices.

  88. Helen Cowie and Jean Rudduck, “Learning from One Another,” p. 236.

  89. For a sense of what is involved in helping teachers to become skilled in CL, see Susan S. Ellis, “Introducing Cooperative Learning,” and the entire Winter 1991/1992 issue of Cooperative Learning magazine.

  90. Ron Brandt, “On Cooperation in Schools: A Conversation with David and Roger Johnson,” p. 15. For more on the subject, see the Johnsons’ book Leading the Cooperative School.

  91. Mary Male, “Cooperative Learning and Staff Development,” p. 4.

  92. Yisrael Rich, “Ideological Impediments to Instructional Innovation,” p. 83.

  93. I am borrowing, in the discussion that follows, from my article “Resistance to Cooperative Learning: Making Sense of Its Deletion and Dilution.”

  94. Goodlad, A Place Called School, pp. 239–42.

  95. Rich, “Ideological Impediments to Instructional Innovation,” p. 83.

  96. Ibid., p. 89.

  97. “The teacher in the cooperative classroom context will be more a facilitator than a director of learning. . . . Children make sense of the learning events together, within a mutually constructed experience. The teacher participates in this process, and as appropriate, models strategies and in other ways provides scaffolding to support children’s thinking until they can function independently” (Nastasi and Clements, “Research on Cooperative Learning,” p. 126).

  98. “Placing more emphasis on students’ explanations necessarily requires teachers to relinquish some control over the direction the lesson will take. This can be a frightening prospect to a teacher who is unprepared to evaluate the validity of a novel idea that students inevitably propose” (James W. Stigler and Harold W. Stevenson, “How Asian Teachers Polish Each Lesson to Perfection,” p. 44). To the extent that this process of empowering students explains much of the resistance, it may be this, rather than CL per se, that is hard to do. Sharan has argued that successful cooperative learning is no more complex or difficult to bring off well than whole-class instruction; the fact that whole-class instruction is used widely does not mean it is being done well (see Sharan, “Cooperative Learning: New Horizons, Old Threats,” p. 5).

  99. Sharan, “Cooperative Learning: New Horizons, Old Threats,” p. 5. Likewise, a British educator writes: “Unless we are prepared to recognize that what’s involved here are radical changes in our expectations of pupils, our own role in the classroom, and our method of classroom management, small group work is likely to remain just another teaching technique, rather than, as it could be, a road toward new patterns of thinking and feeling for the pupils, or new ways for them to make sense of their world” (Alan Howe, “A Climate for Small Group Talk,” pp. 115–16).

  100. Sören Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 165–66.

  101. Yackel et al., “Small Group Interactions as a Source of Learning Opportunities in Second-Grade Mathematics,” p. 396.

  102. Eric Schaps, “Cooperative Learning: The Challenge in the ’90s,” p. 8. Schaps describes his growing sense that something may be wrong even in smoothly functioning cooperative classrooms where children are “on task” and interacting with each other. “They aren’t as careful, as serious, as probing as one would like. They are too casual and quick, and too accommodating, about deciding on their answers. And in the processing afterwards, they tend day after day to give the same, short, almost ‘canned’ answers: ‘We shared and helped each other, and everyone got along.’” Many teachers, he continues, “seem satisfied with easy or predictable answers. Their questions do not often probe or challenge; their comments are often routine and formulaic.” If teachers and students were really exploring ideas wholeheartedly, there would be “more conflict, more frustration” (p. 8).

  103. For example, see Nancy Schniedewind and Ellen Davidson, Cooperative Learning, Cooperative Lives, and Ebba Hierta, Building Cooperative Societies.

  AFTERWORD

  1. See Lonnie Wheeler, “No-Cut Policy Prompts a Lot to Cheer About,” and Michael Ryan, “Here, Everybody Gets to Play.” Of course, opening the cheerleading squad to all who are interested does not change what they are cheering about, namely, competitive triumph, but progress comes one step at a time.

  2. See Joanne Kaufman, “Here She Is, Ms. Tiny Miss!” A full-page New York Times advertisement (on 20 September 1988) for the magazine in which this article app
eared carried the banner headline: “You’re never too young to learn that winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

  3. See Gary Putka, “Knowing Pi Now Could Mean a Shot at a Varsity Letter.”

  4. Walter Bonime, “Competitiveness and Human Potential.”

  5. Dale Miller, “Creative Art vs. Competitions.”

  6. James R. Austin, “Competition: Is Music Education the Loser?”

  7. Dewitt Jones, “No Contest!”

  8. Teen Magazine, “Compete, Don’t Retreat!” The correct answers are those indicating a preference for being graded on a curve (because “it tends to motivate you to stand out from the crowd”), trying to outmaneuver friends for jobs and boyfriends, and so on. Readers who don’t consistently pick these responses are chided for letting their “sense of team spirit slow [them] down.”

  9. Associated Press, “Students Blame Stress Problems on Competition.” Also see Haibin Jiu, “Science Contest Pressures Kids Too Much,” which describes the effects of intense stress brought on by the Westinghouse science competition.

  10. Reuters, “Fight at Exit May Have Slowed Escape from Jet.” Thirty-four people ultimately died in the crash, which took place in early 1991. A few months earlier, eight people died in another crash, this one in Detroit. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed that accident on a “lack of proper crew coordination” in the cockpit and suggested training sessions to help crews cooperate effectively (Lawrence Knutson, “Cockpit Conf usion Cited as Cause of Detroit Crash”). Robert Helmreich and Dean Tjosvold, both of whose work is cited elsewhere in this book, have independently conducted research on airplane crew coordination over the last few years.

  11. “Human nature being what it is,” one article in Working Woman asserted, “experts warn against baring your soul to someone who is going after the same goals" (Holloway McCandless, “Taking the Edge Off Competition”). The psychological costs of perpetual wariness and concealment of one’s emotions are conspicuously ignored here. Likewise, the possibility that a competitive work environment, rather than “human nature,” could be at fault—and might be changed—is never considered.