Drawing Upon Future Identity to Ease Interactions With Faculty for Low-Socioeconomic-Status Students and Improve Academic Performance

• In Event: 52.032 - The Social Class Achievement Gap: Interventions to Promote Performance for First-Generation College Students

Abstract

Objective
Many universities have increased their numbers of low socioeconomic (SES) and first-generation college students yet a persistent gap remains between their graduation rates and those of higher SES or continuing generation students (Choy, 2001; Pascarella, Pierson, Wolniak & Terenzini, 2004). Certain sociocultural aspects of the college context may disproportionately impair the ability of students from low SES family backgrounds to succeed. Specifically, a series of studies investigate social interactions between students and faculty as a key component to success in college that is shaped by SES.

Theoretical background
Students from underrepresented social groups tend to experience discomfort in interactions with faculty (Smedley, Myers, & Harell, 1993) which suggests that student-faculty interactions may be unpleasant and even damaging to subsequent academic performance for low SES students. However, the theory of identity-based motivation (see Oyserman & Destin, 2010) suggests that the experience and consequences of student-faculty interactions can be improved for low SES students by cueing identities that feel more “congruent” with the college context prior to the interaction.

Method and Results
Three studies test the hypothesis that future successful identities can be cued to reduce anxiety during student-faculty interactions and improve subsequent academic performance.
First, Study 1 illustrates that low SES students do in fact report greater anxiety than high SES students in anticipation of a professor’s office hours. However, in Study 2, a laboratory paradigm is used to experimentally manipulate whether low and high SES students considered their past or future identities before a mock student-faculty interaction followed by assessments of immediate effects on anxiety, academic performance and engagement. As predicted, when low SES students are primed with their successful future identity (rather than their past identity) prior to a mock student-faculty interaction, they experience less anxiety and improved performance on academic tasks. Further, this prime increased acute cortisol reactivity during the mock interaction (indicating the body's physiological preparation towards effort and engagement). A second experiment uses the same paradigm to find that priming a successful future identity prior to the mock interaction also increases low SES students' endorsement of status-striving beliefs that match the college culture. High SES students show the opposite pattern of results across the two studies, drawing instead upon their past identity as a source of comfort and motivation.

Significance
These studies contribute to the theory of identity-based motivation by illustrating that a salient identity can influence social interactions and subsequent academic motivation. Furthermore, the consistent interaction effect highlights the significance of SES in the connection between identity and motivation with important implications for intervention.

Authors

• Vida Magarita Manzo

• Mesmin Destin, Northwestern University

• Sarah Townsend