Learners or consumers? Exploring the grade gap between widening and non-widening participation students

Abstract

Increasing numbers of students from widening participation (non-traditional) backgrounds are entering higher education, yet they are typically awarded lower grades than non-widening participation students. This gap was explored from a social identity theory perspective to examine two key student identities that impact academic performance: university student (positive impact), and educational consumer (negative impact). Students were studying in Scotland, United Kingdom, characterised by a mass-consumer culture but government-funded tuition. This provided a natural comparator to research in contexts with student-funded tuition. A moderated moderation model was used to test the hypothesis that a consumer identity would have a negative impact on the relation between university student identity and grades, and that this would be more harmful for widening participation students compared to non-widening participation students given their increased social identity conflicts. An online questionnaire was completed by 133 widening participation and 100 non-widening participation students (85% women, mean age 22.6 years) to measure the strength of their university student identity and consumer identity, widening participation status, and average grades. As expected, the model was significant. For widening participation students, the positive relation between university student identity and grades reduced (disappeared) when students had a stronger consumer identity. For non-widening participation students, however, there were no relations among the variables, thus the hypothesis was partly supported. These findings suggest that a consumer identity contributes to the grade gap between these student groups, and that institutions should support students to resist developing an educational consumer identity in mass-consumer cultural contexts.