Equal Opportunity Tactic

Hercy N.H. Cheng, & Winston M.C. Wu

Competition, despite its potential drawbacks, is an easily adopted and frequently used motivator in classrooms. Individual abilities, in the years of schooling, are inevitably different, and performance in competition is heavily ability dependent, resulting that more-able students always win while less-able students always lose. Students easily perceive how well they perform through the result of competition, which is termed as perceived performance in this paper. Consistently demonstrating lower perceived performance than their peers, the less-able students feel discouraged and frustrated, hardly having the same opportunity for owning the sense of achievement as the more-able students. In this study, the authors designed a computerized mechanism, equal opportunity tactic, to lessen the difference in perceived performance between more-able and less-able students. Equal opportunity tactic is incorporated into a version of a competitive learning game called AnswerMatching, in which every student is assigned an opponent with similar ability.

Papers

Cheng, H. N. H., Wu, W. M. C., Liao, C. C. Y., & Chan, T. W. (2009). Equal opportunity tactic: Redesigning and applying competition games in classrooms. Computers & Education, 53(3), 866-876. (SSCI, EI).

Cheng, H. N. H., Wu, W. M. C., Liao, C. C. Y., & Chan, T. W. (2009). Equal Opportunity Tactic: Balancing Winning Probabilities in a Competitive Classroom Game. In S. C. Kong, H. Ogata, H. C. Arnseth, C. K. K. Chan, T. Hirashima, F. Klett, J. H. M. Lee, C. C. Liu, C. K. Looi, M. Milrad, A. Mitrovic, K. Nakabayashi, S. L. Wong, & S. J. H. Yang (Eds.), Proceedings of the17th International Conference on Computers in Education (pp. 713-717). Hong Kong: Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.

Cheng. H. N. H., Wu, W. M. C., & Chan, T. W. (2008). Equal opportunity tactic: an approach to moderating the differences in ability perception. In P. A. Kirschner, F. Prins, V. Jonker, G. Kanselaar (Eds.),International Perspectives in the Learning Sciences: Cre8ing a learning world, Proceedings of the eighth international conference on International conference for the learning sciences - ICLS 2008, Volume 1 (pp. 136-143). Utrecht, The Netherlands: International Society of the Learning Sciences, Inc.

Wu, W., Cheng, H. N.H., Chiang, M. C., Deng, Y. C., Chou, C. Y., Tsai, C. C., & Chan, T. W. (2007). AnswerMatching: A Competitive Learning Game with Uneven Chance Tactic. In T. W. Chan, A. Paiva, & D. W. Shaffer (Eds.), Proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning (pp.89-96). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society.

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