CC BY-ND 4.0 Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 InternationalJones, SianTaylor, LouiseJohnson, Karl2025-05-262025-05-262025-05-26Jones, S.E., Taylor, L. and Johnson, K. (2025) ‘Learners or consumers? Exploring the grade gap between widening and non-widening participation students’, Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 22(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.53761/3fw71w44.1449-9789https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/14263https://doi.org/10.53761/3fw71w44Sian Jones - ORCID: 0000-0002-2399-1017 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2399-1017Karl Johnson - ORCID: 0009-0007-6064-9150 https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6064-9150VoR added 20/06/2025.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.enCopyright © by the authors, in its year of first publication. This publication is an open access publication under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-ND 4.0 license.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/Widening ParticipationNon-traditional StudentsStudent ConsumersSocial IdentityGradesArticle