A Surrogate Competition Approach to Enhancing Student Learning

Abstract

Although competition is a powerful element to enhance students' motivation, but it still has negative influences on learning. To mitigate possible negative influences, some competition models have been proposed but they are merely suitable for anonymous and face-to-face learning contexts. To address such limitations, there is a need to explore other competition models. To this end, this study proposes the concept of surrogate competition, in which there is no direct competition between each student. Instead, each student has a substitute and the competition takes place between each substitute. Based on this rationale, a My-Pet-My-Arena system is developed and an empirical study was conducted to examine the effects of the surrogate competition. The results revealed that the My-Pet-My-Arena system could help students attribute competitive failures to the lack of effort.