Abstract
<p>Competition matters in our daily life. Humans compete in their jobs, in their relationships, in the classroom etc. for different reason and with different way. We know a lot about competition for the adults but we lack of knowledge on what is happening during the preschool age and this is the focus of the present paper. The literature review shows that young children from the age of 4 years old perceive the concept of competition and express competitive behaviour. The factors which affect young children’s competitive behaviour are the gender, the age and the composition of the team as to gender and size. Moreover, during the implementation of the curriculum children express competitive behaviour in kindergarten classroom. They express competitive behaviours, which are divided into two main categories, verbally and physically, which include and subcategories. Competitive behaviour is expressed by children more often during organized activities and less during free activities, like breakfast time and discussion.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0870/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>
Highlights
The results showed that preschool children express a variety of competitive behavior during organized and/or free activities, and during breakfast time
Under competitive condition they perceive that only one can be the winner and express a desire to excel (Greenberg, 1932; Leuba, 1933; Kimiyoshi, 1951). These results are confirmed by more recent research which showed that preschool children seem to understand competitive conditions and express a desire to excel, enhancing their performance in case of product goals aiming to win (Tsiakara & Digelidis, 2021)
The factors influencing young children competitive behavior are the gender, boys expressed more competitive behavior than girls (McKee & Leader, 1955; McClintock & Moskowitz, 1976), the age, older children compete more than younger (McClintock, Moskowitz & McClintock, 1977) and the composition of the team as to gender and size, both boys and girls express more competitive behaviors when they played with children of different gender than when they played with children of the same gender (Moely, Skarin & Weft, 1979) and when they played in tetrads than in dyads (Benenson, et al, 2001)
Summary
The results showed that under competitive conditions children from the age of 4 years mobilized all physical functions in order to win, increased self-praises and the time spent in building was much shorter compared with noncompetitive conditions This year (2021) we performed a research in order to study the role of competitive activities on preschool children performance with children at a mean age of 5 1⁄2 years, and we asked them to participate in two different games, twice each with a different goal each time: i) the first goal was a product goal, which determine the outcome of learning and lead students’ attention to the outcome rather than to the strategy or method that can lead to the result and ii) the second was a process goal, which refers to methods and strategies that lead students learn handling a specific task. Competition appears at a very early age under specific competitive conditions and in natural environments such as in kindergarten classrooms (Sheridan & Williams, 2006) it is important to note that there are only a few references in the literature concerning the early years of life
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