Stephen's not like that. He's actually helpful to others in the lab, which would be anticompetitive. He did another version just to see how to do it better. Top students tend to be competitive, but getting the grades is not what drives them. I'm setting goals and trying to reach them.
Research suggests that when schools or parents put undue emphasis on grades, learning suffers.
A recent study of 412 fifth-graders by Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck at Columbia University found that kids who are praised for their performance and inherent intelligence are less willing to take risks and have trouble weathering any sort of failure. Kids who receive praise for their hard work and persistence tend to blame failure not on a lack of ability but on not trying hard enough. Alfie Kohn, an educator in Cambridge, Mass., who writes and speaks on behavioral issues, is perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades, test scores and class rankings. All this, argues the author of the influential 1993 book Punished by Rewards and a new book, What to Look for in a Classroom, kills off the love of learning and replaces it with superficial, grade-grubbing behavior. If you have five minutes, talk with your kids for five minutes about what unexpected ideas she came across, or how he feels when he figures something out.