Competition with One's Self against others as a Motive for Effort among Nigerian High School Students
Competition is, in fact, so widely used as a motive for effort among children at home, in school and in informal educational groups that we should review any justification for it offered by literature. A number of srudies on the effect of competition with oneself and others as facilitator in the classroom upon effort and learning show that, whether in Nigeria or other countries, among preschool, grade school, secondary school or postsecondary school students competition and rivalry produce increased effort and speed of accomplishment. However, competition can lead to improvements in quantity of performance but may lessen quality (Rudow & Hautaluoma, 1975). This study examined the effects of two instructional conditions of competition, plus a noncompetition control condition with 12 classroom groups totaling 316 secondary school students. Each competition or control condition was induced by instructions into two classes. Each class was given either a coding or an arithmetic task to obtain measures of (a) quantity of production, (b) quality or errors in performance, and (c) anxiety experienced by the subjects. Among the conditions, competition with others, required the subjects to perform a task at their normal pace and then asked them to identdy the best performance in class by a show of hands. On a second trial at the same task, instructions were given to try to best the highest quantitative score in the class. On Trial 1, a public announcement of scores was not required in the competition-with-self condition, but on Trial 2 the subjects were requited to perform their best without regard to others' performances. For the purposes of reliability, the control condition provided an estimate of test and retest. Analysis of covariance indicated that competing with others and competing with one's self led to greater quantity of work than not competing (p<.001 on coding and arithmetic). This supports Rudow and Hautaluoma's (1975) similar study of American subjects. The competition-with-others score and competition-with-self score were not significantly different. While testing for quality of performance, competition with others led to significantly more errors than either the control condition or competition with self (p<.01). Anxietylphobia scores were not significant differences across conditions. Rudow and Hautaluoma's (1975) observations are supported, namely, "If quality of production is important, and one wishes to use competition, it may be advantageous to schedule competition with a person's own best performance rather than competition with others." It appears that, if errors are not to be considered, competition and rivalty seem to lead to better performance than conditions that encourage noncompetitiveness. Cross-cultural work would allow generalisations of findings.