Equal opportunity tactic: Balancing winning probabilities in a competitive classroom game

The outcome of competition is heavily ability dependent - the more-able students always win while the less-able lose. However, individual abilities are different. Students who consistently demonstrate lower performance than their peers may feel discouraged and frustrated. These lower-performance students hardly have the same winning probabilities as more-able students. In this study the authors design equal opportunity tactic to moderate the difference in performance between more-able and less-able students. The tactic is incorporated into a competitive learning game, AnswerMatching, by assigning every student an opponent with similar ability. A preliminary experiment was also conducted to investigate the effects of the tactic. Results showed that the tactic could balance the performance as well as the belief about how well students could achieve. That is, less-able students could have similar winning probabilities to more-able students.