Economic inequality and student outcomes: What we know and where to go from here.

Abstract

Research on the effects of exposure to economic inequality has primarily focused on adults in their everyday lives. In this review, we argue that these effects extend to children and adolescents in their school environments. We begin by presenting evidence that economic inequality promotes students’ competitive motivations. We then examine three critical implications of this phenomenon for understanding the associations between inequality and students’ affective, relational, and achievement outcomes. First, competitive motivations explain why economic inequality predicts negative achievement emotions like test anxiety. However, as competition evokes not only concern about losing, but also hope about winning, we suggest that inequality may also predict positive achievement emotions like pride. Second, competitive motivations explain why economic inequality predicts antisocial behaviors like cheating, but also prosocial behaviors like tactical cooperation. Indeed, competition can lead students to use either of these behaviors strategically to improve their relative performance (i.e., cheating or cooperating to outperform others). Third, competitive motivations explain why economic inequality does not consistently predict achievement, but may widen the gap between students from wealthier and poorer backgrounds. The reason is that competition does not universally increase or decrease performance, but rather has opposing effects (beneficial for some, detrimental for others). Finally, we suggest that future studies could prioritize longitudinal designs and investigate mechanisms, moderators, and different segments of the inequality distribution. We conclude by highlighting the integrative nature of economic inequality research and calling for more conceptual and empirical work to better understand how inequality shapes the minds of younger generations.