1 Should you compete or cooperate with your classmates?

This paper reviews some recent literature from education studies, which claims that cooperative attitudes in classes yield better achievements among students. It then presents a simple model displaying that an insufficient degree of cooperation between classmates can decrease the overall achievement of the class, due to free riding incentives. A cooperative learning approach becomes desirable when a social cost exists due to the negative opinion of the classmates attached to a competitive behaviour. Empirical evidence supporting our model is found using the 2003 wave of PISA (OECD). A competitive learning approach has a positive individual return (higher in comprehensive educational systems), while the student performance increases with the average cooperative behaviour in the tracked educational systems