Not just who you are, but who you were before: Social identification, identity incompatibility, and performance‐undermining learning behaviour in higher education

Abstract

The current study builds on links between academic social identification and learning behaviors, and extends these models by also considering the level of compatibility between the student identity and the pre-existing self-concept. This is a crucial extension, in the context of broadening access to higher education and fostering belonging and learning in non-traditional students. Further, where previous work focused on learning behaviors that enhance performance (often learning approaches), we also consider performanceundermining behaviors (self-handicapping and procrastination). These effects are explored in survey-responses from an undergraduate student sample (N = 121) from a UK and broader European sample. Participants were predominantly female (69%) and native English speakers (87%). Three models of the relationships between these variables were tested using Mplus.Results indicate that performance undermining behaviors are predicted by identity incompatibility, but not identification level; deep learning approaches are predicted by identification level, but not identity incompatibility. This provides first evidence that identity incompatibility is not just a moderator of the identification-learning relationships but, in fact, a separate identity process for consideration. We also present initial evidence for a mediation model, where in the identity variables are related to procrastination and self-handicapping via learning approaches.

Recognizing the diversity in how students define belonging: evidence of differing conceptualizations, including as a function of students’ gender and socioeconomic background

“…Moreover, although universities share an official discourse of inclusion and diversity, unofficial experiences and previous knowledge about the university system, as described in the subthemes above, were important for students belonging. For instance, the metaphor of belonging to university as feeling at home illustrates how individuals are attracted to environments (in this case universities, disciplines, and social groups) where they perceive they might fit and belong which, indeed, is particularly the case for students from the advantaged majority within the group (Murphy & Zirkel, 2015;Phillips et al, 2020;Smyth et al, 2019).…”

“…Indeed, these experiences facilitated the perception of being acknowledged as university students by themselves and others also known as academic social identity (Smyth et al, 2019). Hence for a group of students, to participate in these activities prompted a feeling of sharing experiences and belonging to a same group, the university student: "Belonging to a University is spending 4 years with a huge community with whom you share the same identity" (P4, woman, mean SES, Russell Group university).…”

Calculating Self-concept Structure Indices, Including Linville’s H: Toward Standardization and Replication

“…Given the documented impact of compatibility among self-perceptions on wellbeing and success (e.g. Iyer et al, 2009;Rosenthal et al, 2011;Smyth et al, 2019), this lost data is a considerable missed opportunity.…”

Structure, Content and Inter‐relationships between Self‐aspects: Integrating Findings from the Social Identity and Self Complexity Traditions

“…Both these sets of literature propose network‐type models of the self‐concept, in which the self is comprised of a number of different self‐perceptions, associated with social groups, contexts, roles and moods. Each offers a method for mapping out the self‐concept (Cruwys et al., 2016; Woolfolk et al., 2004) and taking measures of volume, complexity (Rafaeli‐Mor & Steinberg, 2002), valence compartmentalisation (Showers, 1992; Showers & Kling, 1996), compatibility among aspects (Chayinska et al., 2017; Iyer et al., 2009; Smyth et al., 2019), overall positivity (DeMarco, 2018; Showers, 1995), importance and centrality of aspects (Leach et al., 2008). The approaches to—and understandings of—the self that underpin these two models are largely compatible.…”