Thoughts about a successful future encourage action in the face of challenge

Revisiting the power of future expectations and educational path dependencies

Individuals from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and those with loftier future expectations typically have higher educational attainment. However, it is important to understand just how consequential future expectations are for educational attainment independent of socioeconomic origins-because these expectations might enable intergenerational social mobility. Moreover, it is unclear whether institutional structures moderate the influences of socioeconomic origins and future expectations on educational attainment. I address these questions by analyzing educational attainment as it relates to transitions in a system that offers multiple educational tracks. Using data from a 15-year longitudinal study conducted in Switzerland (N = 4986), I analyze transitions from lower- to upper-secondary education (academic vs. vocational tracks) and from there to university. Path models reveal that both socioeconomic origins and future expectations are significantly associated with individuals' probability of moving along academic paths and into university, but future expectations have a strong unique predictive power even when controlling for socioeconomic origins. However, because the education system partially channels educational trajectories along distinct educational tracks, it minimizes the beneficial effect of future expectations on educational attainment and-by extension-intergenerational social mobility. I conclude that socioeconomic advantage and optimistic future expectations may only shape educational attainment to the extent that institutional opportunity structures allow such resources to take effect.

Educators' Beliefs About Students' Socioeconomic Backgrounds as a Pathway for Supporting Motivation

Students' understandings of their socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds have important implications for their motivation, achievement, and the emergence of SES-based educational disparities. Educators' beliefs about students' backgrounds likely play a meaningful role in shaping these understandings and, thus, may represent an important opportunity to support students from lower-SES backgrounds. We first experimentally demonstrate that educators can be encouraged to adopt background-specific strengths beliefs-which view students' lower-SES backgrounds as potential sources of unique and beneficial strengths (N_{Study 1} = 125). Subsequently, we find that exposure to educators who communicate background-specific strengths beliefs positively influences the motivation and academic persistence of students, particularly those from lower-SES backgrounds (N_{Study 2} = 256; N_{Study 3} = 276). Furthermore, lower-SES students' own beliefs about their backgrounds mediated these effects. Altogether, our work contributes to social-psychological theory and practice regarding how key societal contexts can promote equity through identity-based processes.

Implications of intersecting socioeconomic and racial-ethnic identities for academic achievement and well-being

The evolving study of identity development has become increasingly attentive to the ways that young people think about their socioeconomic and racial-ethnic identities. The status-based identity framework provides one way to analyze the implications of these dynamic identities, particularly as people approach young adulthood. For students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, the experience of socioeconomic mobility can accompany an aversive sense of uncertainty about their own SES, termed status uncertainty, with potential negative implications for their academic behaviors and outcomes. A longitudinal study and experiment demonstrate some of these consequences and suggest how intersections between socioeconomic and racial-ethnic identities may be associated with well-being. This perspective on the dynamic identities of young people calls for consistent attention to the various levels of context that can be leveraged to support positive development, effective goal pursuit, and desired life trajectories.