Abstract
The present study investigated whether the socioeconomic achievement gap in academically at-risk students varied as a function of students’ perceived classroom goal structures. We hypothesized that low socioeconomic status (SES) students would be more susceptible to the various classroom goal structures. Specifically, we hypothesized that high levels of perceived mastery classroom goal structure would mitigate, while high levels of perceived performance goal structures would exacerbate, the negative effects of low family SES on achievement development. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed a secondary dataset from a sample of 784 (53% male) low-achieving students who were assessed annually from grades 4 to 9. The patterns of adaptive learning scale was used to assess perceived classroom goal structures. Woodcock Johnson III tests of achievement or Batería III (for students who primarily spoke Spanish) were used to examine academic achievement. Socioeconomic status was determined by highest education and occupation in household and child qualification for free/reduced lunch. We conducted latent growth models to examine the predictive effects of the interactions between family SES and classroom goal structures on achievement growth trajectories. Overall, our findings did not support our main hypotheses. Specifically, perceived classroom mastery goal structure was positively associated with academic growth among all students regardless of their SES backgrounds. Perceived classroom performance goal structures negatively predicted academic growth more strongly in higher SES students than in lower SES students, stressing the negative effects of performance classroom goal structures on achievement development for low-achieving high SES students.
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Data availability
The current study used a secondary data set that is publicly available to interested researchers through NICHD Dash (https://dash.nichd.nih.gov/).
Notes
Note that while the SES indicators were treated as continuous variables in the presented analyses as they were originally used in the Hollingshead SES Index (Hollingshead, 1975), we also conducted analyses in which the SES indicators were treated as categorical variables. Results across these two sets of analyses remain the same.
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Acknowledgements
The data were collected with the support of Grant HD 039367 awarded to Jan N Hughes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We acknowledge NICHD DASH for providing The Impact of Grade Retention: A Developmental Approach data that was used for this research.
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Quintero, M., Wang, Z. Achievement trajectories in low-achieving students as a function of perceived classroom goal structures and socioeconomic backgrounds. Soc Psychol Educ 26, 1341–1367 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-023-09795-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-023-09795-x