Leveraging Quiz-Based Multiple-Prize Web Tournaments For Reinforcing Routine Mathematical Skills

In Higher Education Engineering studies, there exists the need of engaging students in performing drill and practice activities with the goal of reinforcing routine mathematical skills. The usual optionality of these tasks entails the risk of students not fulfilling them in an effective way. Although competitive approaches are not a trend in current educational practices, there are several arguments that support their use in higher education for addressing this problem, provided that the negative effects of pure interpersonal competitions are mitigated. Recent works in this direction have obtained mixed results. In this work, results of a quasi-experiment conducted to evaluate the effects on students' outcomes and satisfaction of a competitive web-based drill game are presented. Moreover, a novel multiple-prize soft competition design that considers several stages combined with public ranks is proposed, with the goal of minimizing the disadvantages of pure interpersonal competitions. Results indicate that the tournament is highly effective in increasing students' outcomes and that students' satisfaction is rather high.