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
The reading passage lists many advantages for competition in the classroom. However, the speaker in the lecture casts doubt on those claims made in the article.
First of all, the author points out that competition in a classroom develops motivation among the students, insomuch as they would do their best to win. For instance, athletes must gradually improve when they compete against someone as equal as them or better. However, the professor contradicts this specific argument. He states that instead of learning and improving their skills, the competition leads into a surge of anxiety and stress in children. Also, their self-esteem could be affected.
Moreover, the article discusses the idea that competition increase productivity. For example, if the teacher organized a competition of how many books are read on a month, the children will read as many books they can only to be the winner. In this way, it will increase the amount of read books as well as productivity. Nevertheless, the professors disagree with this claim. He explains that new evidence confirmed that what causes the increase of productivity is cooperation, not competition. Due to the overall class would work together for a common goal, which benefits the whole classroom.
Finally, the reading passage describes that compete against each other is fun. Several schools usually organize certain competitions during the school year, such as spelling be, science fair and quizzes in order to let the classmates learn while they are having fun. But the professor can’t be more in disagreement. Due to the fact that it’s only fun for the winners, not to the losers. Instead, he proposes that a healthy competition is the one they do with themselves. For example, in a reading competition the winners would be the children that read more books than last month.
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, but, finally, first, however, if, moreover, nevertheless, so, well, while, for example, for instance, such as, as well as, first of all
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 10.0 10.4613686534 96% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 9.0 5.04856512141 178% => OK
Conjunction : 5.0 7.30242825607 68% => OK
Relative clauses : 11.0 12.0772626932 91% => OK
Pronoun: 28.0 22.412803532 125% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 32.0 30.3222958057 106% => OK
Nominalization: 15.0 5.01324503311 299% => Less nominalizations (nouns with a suffix like: tion ment ence ance) wanted.
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 1553.0 1373.03311258 113% => OK
No of words: 299.0 270.72406181 110% => OK
Chars per words: 5.19397993311 5.08290768461 102% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.1583189471 4.04702891845 103% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.80397236943 2.5805825403 109% => OK
Unique words: 172.0 145.348785872 118% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.57525083612 0.540411800872 106% => OK
syllable_count: 458.1 419.366225166 109% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.55342163355 97% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 3.25607064018 154% => OK
Article: 9.0 8.23620309051 109% => OK
Subordination: 1.0 1.25165562914 80% => OK
Conjunction: 1.0 1.51434878587 66% => OK
Preposition: 2.0 2.5761589404 78% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 19.0 13.0662251656 145% => OK
Sentence length: 15.0 21.2450331126 71% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively short.
Sentence length SD: 38.3214281565 49.2860985944 78% => OK
Chars per sentence: 81.7368421053 110.228320801 74% => OK
Words per sentence: 15.7368421053 21.698381199 73% => OK
Discourse Markers: 7.42105263158 7.06452816374 105% => OK
Paragraphs: 4.0 4.09492273731 98% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 4.19205298013 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 13.0 4.33554083885 300% => Less positive sentences wanted.
Sentences with negative sentiment : 6.0 4.45695364238 135% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 0.0 4.27373068433 0% => More facts, knowledge or examples wanted.
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.208370313478 0.272083759551 77% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0622297350546 0.0996497079465 62% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0655101440578 0.0662205650399 99% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.135539438274 0.162205337803 84% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0226569703979 0.0443174109184 51% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 10.9 13.3589403974 82% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 64.71 53.8541721854 120% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 5.55761589404 56% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 8.0 11.0289183223 73% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 12.53 12.2367328918 102% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.76 8.42419426049 92% => OK
difficult_words: 64.0 63.6247240618 101% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 8.0 10.7273730684 75% => OK
gunning_fog: 8.0 10.498013245 76% => OK
text_standard: 8.0 11.2008830022 71% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 71.6666666667 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 21.5 Out of 30
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.