Marica Valente describes her motivation “In my classroom experiment, I investigated the effects of competition and feedback on competition on the performance of male and female students. My goal was to better understand how males and females differ in their attitudes towards competition. Given that competition is inherent in the labor market, understanding and addressing gender differences remains an important goal.”
The road to students’ success is paved with competitions, and evidence from both the economics and psychological literature show that women generally exhibit a preference for non-competitive environments compared to men (see Piasenti et al. 2023, for a recent review). In the specific context of Marica Valente's course in machine learning, she conducted an experiment to study the role of competition and feedback across male and female students.
In the course, students were provided with a dataset containing various characteristics of the survivors and deceased from the Titanic disaster. Using various algorithms and various variables, students attempted to predict who was more likely to survive the disaster and what characteristics were associated with higher survival probabilities. In class, a classification algorithm was demonstrated and discussed, which students were tasked to outperform either individually or in groups of 2 to 3 students. This put the students in a competitive situation, but collectively against the algorithm demonstrated in class, creating a milder form of rivalry, yet hopefully with enough competitive spirit to enhance learning motivation.
In addition, feedback was provided to the students about their performance in order to enhance their motivation for the following tasks. Preliminary findings indicate that, although for female students the competitive task was not the most preferred one, they took on the challenge, appreciated the feedback and performed strongly in the subsequent tasks. This suggests that lecturers can effectively utilize feedback to enhance skills. Marica Valente even summarizes “The key takeaway from my teaching experiment is that engaging in competitions with constructive feedback has the potential to reduce the gender (and performance) gap in STEM topics.”
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