Defeat Means Friendship: Does Competitive Play Prepare Children for Cooperation?

This work-in-progress quasi-experimental study asks whether the order in which children encounter competitive and cooperative board games affects their social-emotional learning. The authors hypothesise that competitive play may build regulatory skills, such as managing frustration and tolerating adversarial moves, that underpin later cooperation, and that cooperative formats can mask interpersonal tensions that competition brings to the surface. The study involves 86 second-grade students aged seven to eight across four classes in an Italian primary school, divided into competitive-first and cooperative-first sequences across eight monthly sessions from October 2025 to May 2026.

Behaviour was coded during sessions using a purpose-built 23-item observation instrument covering collaboration, misconduct, conflict, emotionality, and strategy and support, supplemented by pre- and post-intervention teacher questionnaires. In the preliminary pre-transition analysis of twelve sessions and 289 coded behaviours, positively coded behaviours made up 55% of cooperative sessions compared with 28% of competitive ones. The authors caution that this aggregate contrast reflects what each game format elicits rather than children's social competence, and that the core sequencing test depends on later data. Two classes also showed notable discrepancies between high baseline teacher ratings and observed in-session conduct, which the authors interpret as evidence that structured play exposes regulatory demands the classroom context can conceal.

The authors are explicit about the study's limitations: with two classes per condition, inferential statistics are not warranted, coding is at group level, there is no control group, and inter-rater reliability has not yet been formally assessed. The paper therefore positions its contributions as descriptive and exploratory, documenting the behavioural contrast between game types, suggesting the instrument's feasibility for non-specialist teachers, and framing sequencing effects as hypothesis-generating pending the final phase of data collection.