Seeing the Destination AND the Path: Using Identity‐Based Motivation to Understand and Reduce Racial Disparities in Academic Achievement

Abstract

African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans aspire to do well in school but often fall short of this goal. We use identity-based motivation theory as an organizing framework to understand how macrolevel social stratification factors including minority–ethnic group membership and low socioeconomic position (e.g., parental education, income) and the stigma they carry, matter. Macrolevel social stratification differentially exposes students to contexts in which choice and control are limited and stigma is evoked, shaping identity-based motivation in three ways. Stratification influences which behaviors likely feel congruent with important identities, undermines belief that one's actions and effort matter, and skews chronic interpretation of one's experienced difficulties with schoolwork from interpreting experienced difficulty as implying importance (e.g., “it's for me”) toward implying “impossibility.” Because minority students have high aspirations, policies should invest in destigmatizing, scalable, universal, identity-based motivation-bolstering institutions and interventions.