Abstract
Teachers’ daily competitive and cooperative practices impact students’ motivation and academic achievement. The present research was conducted among French in-service teachers. Our goal was to examine one of the predictors of the use of competitive and cooperative pedagogical practices by teachers: their belief in school meritocracy. A sample of 818 teachers completed an online survey. They were asked to report their levels of beliefs in school meritocracy (e.g., “At school, where there is a will, there is a way”) as well as how often they use competitive (e.g., “Encourage competition between students to get them to excel) and cooperative practices (e.g., “Have students cooperate with each other so that each student progresses in learning”) in their class. Results showed that the more teachers believed in school meritocracy, the more likely they were to promote a performance goal structure in their class, which was, in turn associated with more frequent use of competitive practices. Conversely, the more teachers believed in school meritocracy, the less likely they were to promote mastery goals, which in turn were associated with more cooperative practices.
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Notes
As mentioned in the introduction, the notion of merit generally refers both to efforts and ability (i.e., talents, Young, 1961) but it is unclear whether the present scale corresponded to effort, ability attributions or both. To address this issue, an attribution measure, inspired by Rattan et al. (2012) was included in the study. Results from correlational analyses indicated that participants’ score on the BSM scale was significantly related to effort attributions (r = .23, p < .001) but not to ability attributions (r = .00, ns). In other words, as done in most research (Castillo et al., 2021), the measure used here mostly captured internal controllable attributions for success and failures (Weiner, 1985). It is worth noting that BSM was negatively related to the attributions of success and failures to teachers and family. For details, see supplementary material online: https://osf.io/5fhte/.
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Darnon, C., Jury, M., Goudeau, S. et al. Competitive and cooperative practices in education: How teachers’ beliefs in school meritocracy are related to their daily practices with students. Soc Psychol Educ 26, 1789–1805 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-023-09824-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-023-09824-9