Empowerment Through Difference: An Online Difference-Education Intervention Closes the Social Class Achievement Gap

• Published in: Personality & social psychology bulletin Vol. 45; no. 7; pp. 1068 - 1083
• Main Authors: Townsend, Sarah S. M., Stephens, Nicole M., Smallets, Stephanie, Hamedani, MarYam G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.07.2019; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Academic achievement; College students; Distance learning; Education; Educational attainment; Empowerment; Higher education; Internet; Intervention; Psychological empowerment; Social classes; Students; Teaching; Understanding; difference-education; academic achievement; intervention; social class
• ISSN: 0146-1672; 1552-7433
• DOI: 10.1177/0146167218804548

A growing body of work suggests that teaching college students a contextual understanding of difference—that students’ different experiences in college are the result of participating in different contexts before college—can improve the academic performance of first-generation students (i.e., students whose parents do not have 4-year college degrees). However, only one empirical study, using an in-person panel format, has demonstrated the benefits of this intervention approach. In the present research, we conduct two studies to test the effectiveness of a new difference-education intervention administered online to individual students. In both studies, first-year students read senior students’ and recent graduates’ stories about how they adjusted to college. In the difference-education condition, stories conveyed a contextual understanding of difference. We found that the online intervention effectively taught students a contextual understanding of difference and closed the social class achievement gap by increasing first-generation students’ psychological empowerment and, thereby, end-of-second-year grades.