The COVID-19 pandemic has forced teachers and parents to quickly adapt to a new educational context: distance learning. Teachers developed online academic material while parents taught the exercises and lessons provided by teachers to their children at home. Considering that the use of digital tools in education has dramatically increased during this crisis, and it is set to continue, there is a pressing need to understand the impact of distance learning. Taking a multidisciplinary view, we argue that by making the learning process rely more than ever on families, rather than on teachers, and by getting students to work predominantly via digital resources, school closures exacerbate social class academic disparities. To address this burning issue, we propose an agenda for future research and outline recommendations to help parents, teachers and policymakers to limit the impact of the lockdown on social-class-based academic inequality.

United States higher education prioritizes independence as the cultural ideal. As a result, firstgeneration students (neither parent has a four-year degree) often confront an initial cultural mismatch early on in college settings: they endorse relatively interdependent cultural norms that diverge from the independent cultural ideal. This initial cultural mismatch can lead first-generation students to perform less well academically compared with continuing-generation students (one or more parents have a four-year degree) early in college. Yet, what happens as first-generation students experience the university culture throughout their time in college? Using cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches, we find that initial cultural mismatch is associated with psychological and academic costs that persist until graduation. First, at college entry, we find social class differences in cultural norms: first-generation students endorse more interdependent cultural norms than their continuing-generation peers. Second, endorsing interdependence at college entry predicts reduced subjective sense of fit in college four years later. Third, lower subjective sense of fit predicts lower grade point average and subjective social status upon graduation. Together, these results suggest that initial cultural mismatch contributes to worse experiences and academic outcomes among first-generation students, and that these disparities persist even until graduation. Further, we find that social class differences in cultural norms remain stable throughout college: first-generation students continue to endorse more interdependence than do continuing-generation students. We suggest providing access is not sufficient to reduce social class inequity; colleges need to create more inclusive environments to ensure that students from diverse backgrounds can reap similar rewards.

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.