Competition, Motivation, and Student Engagement

We consider the gamification aspect of a technology that delivers small daily tasks to students to analyze how competition motivates engagement. We randomly assigned 400 students into teams of up to 10, who compete by committing to the daily task and then acknowledging their completion later in the day. Using data collected from the leaderboard, we test whether student engagement with respect to competition varies systematically by gender and by the level of anonymity. Not surprisingly, being ranked in the top three is highly motivating. However, among lower-ranked students, male students tend to disengage when usernames are not anonymous.