Cooperative Learning vs. Competitive Learning: What Eight Decades of Research Says

Which works better, cooperation or competition? For achievement and peer relationships, the research favors cooperation. A 2008 meta-analysis of 148 studies by Cary Roseth, David Johnson and Roger Johnson, covering over 17,000 early adolescents, associated cooperative goal structures with higher achievement and more positive peer relationships than competitive or individualistic ones.

Teachers who like a leaderboard have a smaller body of evidence to lean on. In a 2004 series of four studies, competition between groups produced higher intrinsic motivation than either structure alone, though the tasks were not classroom lessons. Most classroom evidence for cooperation is decades old, and only two of the studies below test it directly against competition.

Treating the competition as a goal, with teamwork around it

Rapunzl pairs gamified learning with a free national scholarship competition that runs January to early May, which raises the question this post is about: does competing help students learn, or does cooperating? The studies below point to cooperative goal structures as the stronger base for achievement and peer relationships. They also suggest that mixing teamwork into competition may keep some of its energy.

So we treat the competition as the season's goal, and we suggest teachers build the work around it by having students explain their reasoning to each other. That suggestion is design guidance. None of the research here tested Rapunzl, a scholarship competition or a finance course.

What does the research say about cooperative learning and achievement?

The table covers five studies and reviews chosen to span designs and ages. Much of the tradition comes from two groups of researchers, Robert Slavin's and the Johnson brothers', and the studies in the table run from 1980 to 2008.

Cooperative structures come out ahead of traditional instruction or of the other goal structures tested in these studies. Only two rows, the 1986 experiment and the 2008 meta-analysis, pit cooperation directly against competition.

How does cooperation compare with competition head to head?

In the 1986 experiment, students were randomly assigned, stratified by sex and ability, so the design supports a causal reading for that group and task. The 2008 meta-analysis associated cooperative goal structures with better outcomes than competitive ones, and its authors framed the result as a test of social interdependence theory.

Pure competition is not the same as team competition, and the evidence for team competition is smaller. In a 2004 series of four studies, John Tauer and Judith Harackiewicz compared cooperation, competition and the combination, which they called intergroup competition. In three studies built around shooting a basketball, cooperation and competition alone did not differ on task enjoyment or performance. Intergroup competition consistently produced higher intrinsic motivation, and higher performance in two of the three. A fourth, questionnaire study replicated the effect on enjoyment.

A 2019 meta-analysis of gamification by Michael Sailer and Lisa Homner adds a classroom-adjacent signal. For behavior, the pooled data favored combining competition with collaboration. For motivation, the authors say the advantage might also hold, based on an analysis of the more rigorous studies.

Put together, competition between individual students looks like the weaker structure and cooperation looks stronger. Competition between teams may keep some of the energy of the first without giving up the second, but that last step rests on a basketball task and one gamification review.

Where the evidence is weak

The evidence is old. Slavin's review is from 1980, the experiment with eighth graders is from 1986, and the two-year school study is from 1995. Classroom conditions have changed a great deal since then.

Not every study finds a benefit. In a 1999 quasi-experiment, Chun-Yen Chang and Song-Ling Mao taught 770 ninth graders in 20 earth science sections cooperatively or traditionally. Overall achievement, knowledge-level and comprehension-level items showed no significant differences. Students who worked cooperatively did score significantly better on application-level items, and the authors read that as a pattern favoring higher but not lower cognitive levels. It comes from a single study.

Some studies are small or bundle several changes together. Lonning's study used two sections. The Stevens and Slavin model changed more than group work: it also included peer coaching, cooperative planning by teachers, parent involvement and full-scale mainstreaming, so the school-level gains cannot be credited to group work alone.

Authorship is concentrated. Several of the studies above come from the same two research groups, and the 2008 meta-analysis was written by the Johnson brothers and a collaborator. Newer, independent work such as the gamification meta-analysis is worth reading alongside the classics.

Terms are slippery. In a 2023 review in TechTrends, Xigui Yang traces cooperative and collaborative learning to two separate groups of scholars and notes the relationship between the terms can be confusing.

Finally, there is little classroom research on team competition itself. The direct evidence on combining the two comes from a basketball-shooting task and from a gamification meta-analysis, not from a high school course.

What this means in a classroom

A leaderboard can stay. A few design choices follow from the studies, and the last two are judgment calls.

• Make the team the unit that earns recognition. Slavin's review describes the methods as small-group work in which students receive rewards or recognition based on group performance.
• Teach students how to work together before you grade them on it. In Lonning's study, the cooperative section received instruction in collaborative skills and group evaluation of assignments.
• Compete across teams, with support inside them. The Tauer and Harackiewicz result is about intergroup competition, so keep the rivalry between teams.
• Consider mixed-ability teams. The one whole-school study that included them (elementary, bundled with other changes) found that students who would otherwise have been in pull-out remedial programs achieved more than similar peers in comparison schools, and the results suggest gifted students in mixed cooperative classes did too. It cannot isolate team makeup, so this is a judgment call.
• Give every team a goal it can still reach, such as beating its own earlier score. This is our judgment, not a finding from the studies.

For formats to start with, see economics classroom games for high school and gamified financial literacy.

If you are weighing team structure and a season-long competition for your classroom, request a free Rapunzl demo and a member of our team will set it up for you.

By Maria Rodriguez, Curriculum Designer at Rapunzl.