Identity Research That Engages Contextual Forces to Reduce Socioeconomic Disparities in Education

Socioeconomic Resources and Identity

Identities refer to the ways that people understand who they are, sometimes in connection to the groups that they belong to (i.e., social identity; Hogg, 2006), the meaning they make out of past experiences (i.e., narrative identity; McAdams & McLean, 2013), or the thoughts they have about their possible futures (i.e., future identity; Destin, Rheinschmidt-Same, & Richeson, 2017; Oyserman & Destin, 2010). Identities are especially relevant to the study of education because they are shaped by contexts such as neighborhoods and educational institutions, and they also guide young people’s goal-directed behaviors, such as school engagement. For example, a rich tradition of research on racial-ethnic identity demonstrates how the messages that young people receive at home and school about what it means to be a member of their racial-ethnic group shape how they respond to social challenges, such as racial discrimination, and goal-related situations, such as academic opportunities (see Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014; Yip, Seaton, & Sellers, 2006). Thus, identities can help in understanding how social contexts and social inequalities influence individuals’ thoughts and behaviors.

Some identity-based research that is particularly relevant to socioeconomic disparities in education draws attention to the ways that barriers and opportunities for economic advancement affect the future outlook and academic motivation of young people. For example, one area of research demonstrates that the more young people from lower-SES backgrounds believe that socioeconomic mobility is likely in society, the more likely they are to imagine futures for themselves that include a college education (Browman, Svoboda, & Destin, 2019). Further, these studies demonstrate a consistent connection between beliefs about socioeconomic mobility and students’ academic persistence and outcomes. During both high school and college, students from lower-SES backgrounds who perceived more socioeconomic mobility (which is linked to thoughts about their own future identities) found more meaning in academic tasks and earned higher grades. In experiments, participants who were randomly assigned to encounter evidence of high rates of socioeconomic mobility showed a corresponding increase in academic persistence, compared with participants who encountered evidence of low mobility rates (Browman, Destin, Carswell, & Svoboda, 2017).

In addition to the positive academic effects of a generally optimistic socioeconomic outlook, receiving specific information about financial opportunities to pursue school goals, such as need-based financial aid, also has a positive effect on the school behaviors of young people in contexts with limited financial resources (Destin & Oyserman, 2009). This information matters because it increases the likelihood that young people imagine futures for themselves that are connected to higher education (Destin, 2017), which has an effect on their motivation to engage in schoolwork (Destin & Oyserman, 2010). Note, however, that students’ beliefs about opportunities and their possible futures are constantly shaped by higher-level forces such as economic inequality (Browman, Destin, Kearney, & Levine, 2019). Therefore, the foundation of research related to socioeconomic resources and identity has the most potential impact for science and society when considered in relation to socioecological models of development (see Bronfenbrenner, 1977), sociocultural models of the self (see Stephens, Markus, & Fryberg, 2012), collaborative systems of care (see Dodge, 2018), and other frameworks that directly and systematically engage various levels of social context. In other words, a psychologically informed approach to addressing socioeconomic disparities in education must also address multiple levels of a student’s context rather than emphasizing only an individual-focused approach.

Peers and Parents as Levels of Context

A growing number of controlled field experiments have expanded identity-based approaches to understanding patterns of student achievement by focusing on the contexts and individuals that surround students. For example, peers and slightly older near peers hold significant influence over the ways that young people think about many important aspects of their lives during early adolescence (see Paluck & Shepherd, 2012). Thus, peers can be effectively leveraged to help students explore and develop a sense of their possible futures and corresponding pathways and opportunities toward those futures in order to support their school motivation. In one experiment, high school students were randomly assigned to receive training and implement an identity-based curriculum focused on developing images of possible future selves and strategies to reach them (see Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006) with near-peer middle school mentees. Middle school students who were randomly assigned to engage in the identity-based mentoring with a high school student showed increased academic motivation at the end of the program compared with students who were randomly assigned to a basic high school tutor (Destin, Castillo, & Meissner, 2018). The study demonstrates that near peers are an important force surrounding students and can shape identities and motivation in targeted ways. Such findings have implications for disparities in academic experiences and outcomes.

Parents provide another level of consistent contextual influence that has shown a predictable relationship with student outcomes during early adolescence. As in the work related to peers, field experiments have begun to directly leverage the role of parents in providing young people with opportunities to explore their identities and possible paths to the future. In another field experiment, parents of eighth-grade students were randomly assigned to two groups, each of which attended a different after-school program. In the treatment condition, the program included live testimonials of other parents focused on discussions with their children about the future, academic challenges, and resources such as financial aid that open possibilities for a range of future goals. The children of parents who were randomly assigned to the treatment condition had a significant increase in their grades throughout the school year compared with the children of parents assigned to a different after-school program (Destin & Svoboda, 2017).

These approaches to engage with individuals who surround students during early adolescence have implications for programs and institutions that go beyond a student-focused intervention approach. They instead aim to identify some of the levels of context that wield a consistent influence on the development of students’ thoughts about who they are, what matters to them, what they want for their futures, and how they want to approach those possibilities. Through these strategies, young people remain agents in defining their own identities while also obtaining the support of key influences in their lives. There are many other possible levels of context to engage in such an approach, and they continue to matter throughout early adolescence and beyond.

Teachers, Classrooms, and Identity Development

The teachers and classrooms that young people encounter have perhaps the most direct contextual influence on students’ developing sense of identity and corresponding response to school (see Jackson, 2018). One relevant study focused on this role of teachers through an explicit training of eighth-grade teachers to facilitate a curriculum (see Oyserman, 2015) designed to provide opportunities for students to explore their thoughts about the future and their identities more broadly. This approach demonstrated that most teachers were able to facilitate the identity-focused program to reach adequate fidelity standards, and further, higher levels of fidelity to the training were associated with increases in their students’ grades (Horowitz, Sorensen, Yoder, & Oyserman, 2018).

Other studies have experimentally shown how specific classroom practices can threaten or support the identities of students from lower-SES backgrounds in ways that affect their achievement. In a series of school-based field experiments, lower-SES students performed worse on academic tasks than higher-SES students in classrooms in which differences in performance were made visible through practices such as raising hands (Goudeau & Croizet, 2017). However, when students were given an explanation for possible differences in performance, such as differences in familiarity with a task, socioeconomic disparities did not emerge. Relatedly, studies demonstrate that lower-SES college students perform worse on academic tasks than higher-SES students when academic tasks are framed as a tool for ranking and sorting students (Jury, Smeding, & Darnon, 2015). Socioeconomic disparities in achievement on the same tasks do not emerge when they are presented as a tool to evaluate learning.

These studies demonstrate that the way students’ backgrounds relate to their achievement depends on specific classroom practices. Certain practices signal to students that their identities are not associated with success in school, whereas others create a more equitable environment. Professional development opportunities can provide teachers with evidence-based approaches that reduce the likelihood that their classrooms will produce unnecessary socioeconomic disparities in achievement. Even beyond individual teachers and classrooms, however, psychological science can inform how aspects of a broader institutional climate or even social policy can equitably support student identities and success.

Institution-Level Considerations

The idea of a climate of a school, college, or university can be abstract and elusive; however, there have been significant advances in capturing the implications of how students perceive their institution’s orientation toward its students and diversity. Building on past research regarding the effect of the climate of schools and organizations on racial and gender diversity (e.g., Murphy, Steele, & Gross, 2007), studies have also demonstrated the effects of how a university approaches socioeconomic diversity on students’ experiences and achievement. When a university signals that it values socioeconomic diversity through promotion of resources such as financial aid and work study, lower-SES students show several positive responses, compared with when a university signals that it values its wealth and the contributions of its wealthier students (Browman & Destin, 2016). Specifically, this warmer climate toward socioeconomic diversity leads lower-SES students to feel a stronger sense of academic efficacy and implicit identification with being a high-achieving student. These effects emerge among students who are objectively high achievers and who have been admitted to selective institutions; however, the climate can determine whether they maintain or lose a sense of confidence in their continued academic success.

In another study that captured the importance of the institutional climate, students were randomly assigned to experience different types of orientations during their first years of college. A treatment condition that showcased testimonials from students from a range of different backgrounds and organically conveyed the value of their diversity as a part of success had positive effects, compared with standard testimonials that did not mention student backgrounds. These experiences had positive effects on psychological adjustment for all students but were especially beneficial for the academic achievement of first-generation college students (Stephens, Hamedani, & Destin, 2014; Townsend, Stephens, Smallets, & Hamedani, 2019). Programs that establish that an institution values diversity and that students from diverse backgrounds leverage their past experiences for success carry weight in how new students navigate their time in college.

These studies related to the institutional climate do not imply, however, that institutions should simply worry only about messaging and signaling. Instead, colleges and universities should also commit to developing and elevating real policies and practices that provide the institution-specific support that students need and often request. This attention to policies, practices, and supports is especially necessary for institutions that are working to increase their sociodemographic diversity during admission. To move toward more genuine equity and inclusion, these historically homogenous environments will need to interrogate the biased status-maintenance motives that may remain embedded within the institution and endorsed by institutional actors (see Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) as they redesign structures that were originally developed to serve students from economically privileged backgrounds and dominant cultural groups.

Conclusions

One of the most pressing concerns in psychological science is how to bring insights from smaller studies to a larger scale in order to realize potential positive effects at a population level. In some areas of research related to identity threats (see Steele, 2010) and wise interventions (see Walton & Wilson, 2018), major strides have been made by improving sampling approaches and using nationally representative samples to better understand the role of psychological factors in student outcomes (e.g., Destin, Hanselman, Buontempo, Tipton, & Yeager, 2019) and heterogeneity in intervention-treatment effects (e.g., Yeager et al., 2019). A complementary approach to moving toward scale in psychology is to more deeply consider and design studies in ways that engage various levels of social context and influence. As described, psychological studies related to the connections between SES, identity, and motivation have demonstrated how peers, parents, instructors, and institutional climates can be leveraged in ways that have meaningful positive effects on student trajectories. An emphasis on levels of social context as an approach to scale carries benefits for both science and society. First, it helps psychological scientists to systematically respond to a longstanding critique that psychological science neglects important aspects of sociocultural contexts and overemphasizes individual-focused intervention in understanding complex social issues. Further, it provides tangible strategies for stakeholders operating at each level of social context to utilize when engaging with their communities in a way that can expand the reach of insight gained from psychological research.

As research at the intersection of psychology and education continues to evolve, there are opportunities to carefully examine the consequences of combining multiple approaches, such as an instructor-focused program paired with a traditional direct-to-student intervention. It remains unclear whether the positive effects of particular psychological mechanisms across various levels of context are additive, multiplicative, or redundant. Adequately addressing these possibilities is likely to require multidisciplinary teams of scholars and is almost certain to broaden the impact of psychological science on people’s lives.

Recommended Reading

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1977). (See References). Foundational contribution to the research discussed in this article that has led to a greater emphasis on socioecological considerations in understanding human development.

Browman, A. S., Destin, M., Kearney, M. S., & Levine, P. B. (2019). (See References). A model integrating evidence across disciplines to help researchers understand the connections between inequality and individual outcomes during adolescence and young adulthood.

Oyserman, D. (2015). (See References). Overview of a psychological theory connecting contextual affordances, identities of young people, and motivation in addition to an in-depth description of a theory-based intervention.