Citation

Goudeau S, Croizet JC. Psychol. Sci. 2017; 28(2): 162-170.

Affiliation

Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition et l'Apprentissage and CNRS Unité Mixte de Recherche 7295, Université de Poitiers.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797616676600

PMID

28182527

Abstract

Three studies conducted among fifth and sixth graders examined how school contexts disrupt the achievement of working-class students by staging unfair comparison with their advantaged middle-class peers. In regular classrooms, differences in performance among students are usually showcased in a way that does not acknowledge the advantage (i.e., higher cultural capital) experienced by middle-class students, whose upbringing affords them more familiarity with the academic culture than their working-class peers have.

RESULTS of Study 1 revealed that rendering differences in performance visible in the classroom by having students raise their hands was enough to undermine the achievement of working-class students. In Studies 2 and 3, we manipulated students' familiarity with an arbitrary standard as a proxy for social class. Our results suggest that classroom settings that make differences in performance visible undermine the achievement of the students who are less familiar with academic culture. In Study 3, we showed that being aware of the advantage in familiarity with a task restores the performance of the students who have less familiarity with the task.

Language: en

Keywords

academic achievement; open data; open materials; social comparison; sociocultural factors; socioeconomic status