Cooperative games vs competitive games in Primary School Education: What effects do they have on schoolchildren motivation?

As a school subject, the ultimate goal of Physical Education (PE) is to help schoolchildren to learn different concepts, skills and values. For this reason, it is important to understand student’s motivation in PE learning process, and how different teaching strategies and methodologies influence children motivation. Then, the aim of this study was to assess the impact of two units (one of them based on cooperative games and the other one based on competitive games) on primary school student’s motivation. The program involved the participation of 227 (114 males and 113 females) students belonging to fifth and sixth grade (M=9.79; DT=1.30) from state school in Galicia, Spain. The design was a quasi-experimental pre and post-test. The control group (CG) and Experimental Groups (Competitive Group -EG1- and Cooperative Group -EG2-) consisted of 61 (CG), 82 (EG1) and 84 (EG2) students, respectively. The Motivation Questionnaire in Physical Education for Primary Education (MQPE-PE) was used to measure the schoolchildren motivation. The results show that there are statistically significant differences in EG1 in IM p =.008); EM (p<.001) and in DEM (p=.020). In EG2 only these differences have been found in IM (p=.030) and in DEM (p=.034). Cooperative games caused significant improvements in IM while the opposite effect is observed in the competitive games participants; IM decreases and EM and DEM increases. ; Portuguese national funds through the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) within the framework of the CIEC (Research Center for Child Studies of the University of Minho) project under the reference UID/CED/00317/2019.