Is Competition Good for Learning?
5 min read
For some kids, practice is electric when they race a friend. For others, the same race is a weekly announcement of where they rank. Both things are true at once, and the researchers below explain how.
Short answer: Competition is a reason to show up, and the evidence is limited to that. Researchers who have tested competitive learning find no reliable learning gain from competition itself, and classroom teachers report that some slower starters read it as proof they're failures. In an effective design, self-paced mastery is the spine and head-to-head play is a choice, never the price of admission.
How do students respond to competition in a classroom?
A teacher in a 2024 Tanzanian study of times-table mastery put both halves in two sentences. Competition "helps students to memorize multiplication tables quickly," she told the researchers, and it "sometimes brings the stagnation of knowledge to students who are not quick to grasp things… they consider themselves to be failures" (Ndalu & Juma, 2024). The quick memorizers get fuel. The slower ones get evidence for the worst story they tell about themselves, and a student who has decided "I'm bad at this" has a bigger problem than any single fact gap. Slow, correct work is the signature of missing fact fluency, and fluency is fixable. A settled identity as the kid who loses is much harder to fix.
Do students learn more when they compete?
Treat that claim with suspicion. In their 2022 meta-analysis of game-based chemistry learning, Hu et al. looked for studies in which researchers isolated individual design features and found competition tested directly only once, with no significant learning benefit; the point estimate was on the negative side. Competition is fuel for showing up, and showing up is prerequisite to everything. The stronger claim, that students learn more by racing than by practicing, has no support in the research.
There's a better-evidenced engine for the students who most need one. In a 2025 Hungarian university study, Muzsnay et al. found that in math courses taught conventionally, a student's entry score was a predictor of their final score months later; in courses where the instructor ended each lesson with a short answer-from-memory test, that link was gone, and students who started behind finished level with the rest. The equalizer was a plain memory routine, run on a schedule.
How should we use competition in a learning game, then?
| Signs the student is better off | Signs the student is worse off |
|---|---|
| The student asks for the rematch | The student avoids playing in front of others |
| The student reads a loss as "again!" not "I'm dumb" | The student stops after a loss |
| The student measures progress against their own past | The student measures progress against the fastest kid |
| Head-to-head is one mode among several | Ranking is the only scoreboard that exists |
This is the design brief we build against. In Periodic Mole, the spine is a solo mastery ladder: we track every element as coming up, learning, or mastered, and a student climbs against their own record, at their own level. Multiplayer exists because racing a friend is a great reason to show up, and we keep it optional. Against Cobalt, we set each question at the student's own level; in a live Bond Forge or Pt Paddle match, we pace the questions to whichever player is earlier on the element ladder, so the contest is between people, never between one kid and material they haven't been taught yet. Students come back for the competition and learn from the practice.
Try it free. Bond Forge is free to play with a starter set of elements, no account needed. Full access is $59 for a year: every game and all 118 elements, with progress saved. No subscription.
FAQ
Is competition bad for kids who are behind? Unmanaged, it can be: teachers report slower starters reading public races as proof they're failures, and disengaging. Managed well, with self-paced material and opt-in contests, the same students get the practice benefits without the ranking costs.
Do students learn more from competitive learning games than solo ones? Researchers haven't shown a learning advantage from competition itself, and in the one chemistry game study where researchers tested it directly, there was none. Competition's real value is motivational: students come back for practice they'd otherwise skip.
My kid only wants to play against friends. Is that fine? Yes, if the questions are paced to whichever player is earlier on the element ladder, so either side can win. Then the contest is about play, and every answer still counts as retrieval practice.
What should a struggling student do instead of competing? Short, frequent answer-from-memory practice with material at their level. In university courses with that routine, under-prepared students closed the gap with well-prepared students within a semester.
Related
- Is Game-Based Learning Effective? 34 Studies
- Element Symbols: Chemistry's Times Tables
- How to Study Chemistry With Friends
- How to Help a Teen Struggling in Chemistry
Sources
- Ndalu, D. M., & Juma, Z. R. (2024). Factors influencing mastery of multiplication tables to pupils in selected Dodoma primary schools. Journal of Research Innovation and Implications in Education, 8(3).
- Hu, Y., et al. (2022). Game-based learning has good chemistry with chemistry education: A three-level meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 59(9).
- Muzsnay, A., Szabó, C., Zámbó, C., Szabó, G., & Szeibert, J. (2025). Retrieval practice — a tool to narrow the achievement gap in learning higher mathematics. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 23.