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

Abstract

Students from widening participation (non-traditional) backgrounds are increasingly 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 performance: university student (positive impact), and educational consumer (negative impact). Students were studying in a mass-consumer cultural context, Scotland, United Kingdom. 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). 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.