The Strengths of People in Low-SES Positions: An Identity-Reframing Intervention Improves Low-SES Students’ Achievement Over One Semester

Students from low socioeconomic-status (SES) backgrounds such as first-generation and low-income students are often portrayed as deficient, lacking in skills and potential to succeed at university. We hypothesized that such representations lead low-SES students to see their SES-identity as a barrier to success and impair achievement. If so, reframing low-SES students’ identity as a source of strength may help them succeed. Testing this hypothesis, we developed a highly scalable online-exercise. In Experiment 1 (N=214), this SES-identity-reframing exercise helped low-SES students to see their SES-identity more as a source of success, and boosted their performance in an academic task by 13%. In Experiment 2, a large randomized-controlled intervention field-experiment with 786 students, we implemented the identity-reframing intervention in a university’s online-learning-program. This improved low-SES students’ grades over the semester. Acknowledging the strengths low-SES students bring to university settings can help these students access their strengths and apply them to schooling.