Graduating from high school, going to college, getting a high-paying job. It’s hard to set goals—let alone achieve them—if you can’t picture the steps toward that imagined future. And for many students from low–socioeconomic status (low-SES) backgrounds, the message received is loud and clear: Your identity is a disadvantage. Those options aren’t for you. Mesmin Destin, PhD, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, wants to turn that message on its head.
Much of Destin’s work is centered on supporting young people from low-SES backgrounds to succeed using the tools they have developed because of their life circumstances. In a recent study, for instance, Destin worked with a diverse Chicago middle school with a large proportion of Latinx students. He and his colleagues helped students connect the dots between their future goals and personal strengths related to their racial/ethnic identities. Preliminary findings suggest that when students can picture paths to their goals that align with their identities, they stay more engaged in school.
The project is one study in a body of work that explores how students’ social environments and socioeconomic resources influence their motivation, behaviors, and academic achievements. Through lab research and school-based field experiments, Destin seeks to identify and create the contexts that will help students succeed. “We’re constantly thinking about how to conceptualize backgrounds that are often seen as ‘disadvantaged.’ That’s a really limited way of looking at people, and their resources and strengths often go unacknowledged,” he says. “We’re trying to think more holistically about what student outcomes look like, and we strive to better understand how resources surrounding young people shape the trajectory of how they view themselves as they pursue their goals.”
Turning disadvantages to strengths
Destin earned his PhD in social psychology at the University of Michigan in 2010. His adviser, Daphna Oyserman, PhD, has a background in both social psychology and social work—a combination that fit neatly with Destin’s interest in exploring how factors related to economic resources and social class play into fundamental psychological processes like motivation, identity formation, and emotional well-being, he says. “I had an expansive training that allowed me to think early on about how social psychology connects to communities and to education and schools.”
After graduation, Destin immediately launched his lab at Northwestern, where his work ranges from theoretical to hands-on. “As an experimental social psychologist, I’m interested in pinning down the factors that matter in a controlled way,” he says. “But we also develop partnerships with schools to do research and even assist with programming.”
That range is unusual among social psychologists working in the world of education, says Alex Browman, PhD, who did his doctoral work with Destin and is now an assistant professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. “His research involves very theoretical social cognition work but also looks at how to apply that knowledge to make change in the real world,” he says.
Those real-world participants mostly include middle school, high school, and college students. The project on racial/ethnic identity and future goals is typical of the lab’s work in schools, says Régine Debrosse, PhD, a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab and now an assistant professor at McGill University, who took the lead on that project. The study built on the Pathways to Success program, an intervention Oyserman developed that has been shown to increase engagement by helping students imagine a route to their future goals. While the intervention itself improves motivation for learning, emphasizing the racial identity component seems to increase engagement even more, according to preliminary data. “If students can visualize what will happen on the pathway to college, they’re more likely to stay engaged and fight obstacles as they arise,” Debrosse says. “This work suggests that fusing those activities with reflections about a student’s own race and ethnicity, especially for students of color, helps them better see the connection between their identity and the path they want to reach in the future.”
Other projects have also looked at ways to draw on students’ identities to help them succeed. Doctoral student Ivan A. Hernandez conducted a short online experiment that guided students to reflect on their background-specific strengths—the unique knowledge, skills, perspectives, and strengths broadly associated with the marginalized experience. Teenagers who must work to help their families make ends meet, for example, might reflect on having learned the value of hard work and time management—lessons that could also apply to schoolwork. Students who have to care for siblings might write about the nurturing qualities they’d developed as a result, and how those qualities might prepare them for a career in fields such as nursing. “Instead of saying there are disadvantages associated with being a student of color, for example, we can prompt them to think about the strengths they’ve gained and how they help them succeed, such as persisting in the face of adversity,” Hernandez says.
In a sample of undergraduates from lower SES backgrounds, those who read and wrote about their background-specific strengths scored higher on measures of self-esteem and academic persistence than those who wrote about their daily schedules or simply completed a questionnaire without performing any task. In a second study of lower-SES Black and Latinx eighth graders, those who participated in the activity were more likely to agree with the idea that they had unique strengths that benefited their schools and society. And compared with students who did not read or write about their background-specific strengths, they had higher grades at the end of the academic term (Hernandez, I. A., et al., Journal of Experimental Social Psychologyopens in new window, Vol. 92, No. 1, 2021).
“The standard message is that students’ backgrounds are part of why they struggle. When you shift that narrative, it has direct positive effects for well-being and achievement,” Destin says. And helping teachers recognize students’ unique strengths is an important part of rewriting that story. “When teachers provide students with a message that’s based on this strength-based approach, we see immediate positive effects on the ways they plan to engage with students,” he adds.
Stepping-stones to socioeconomic mobility
For some young people, education is an obvious stepping-stone toward a more stable future. But not all students are shown how lectures and homework relate to their lives and goals. In a series of studies, Browman and Destin showed that among low-SES students, those who believed it was possible to climb the socioeconomic ladder were more likely to envision futures for themselves that were dependent on pursuing education beyond high school. That vision, in turn, increased their motivation to push themselves academically (Browman, A. S., et al., Journal of Experimental Social Psychologyopens in new window, Vol. 72, No. 1, 2017).
Based on that finding, Browman and Destin developed an experimental program to help students envision education-dependent futures for themselves. They hypothesized that introducing students to multiple educational pathways to future mobility might make them more likely to see the relevance of education to their own lives. They recruited alumni from a low-SES public high school to talk to current students about their career paths and the financial and quality-of-life benefits they’d experienced as a result. Half of the students heard from two college graduates. The other half heard from both a college grad and an alumnus who spoke about postsecondary vocational programs. Low-SES students who were introduced to the idea of multiple educational pathways were more likely to describe themselves in future roles that hinged on some type of postsecondary education or training, and they reported stronger academic intentions than those who only heard the presentations about a single education-based option (Browman, A. S., et al., Self and Identityopens in new window, 2019).
“We wanted to boost the connection between education and the different futures that students might envision for themselves,” Browman says. “While it was a small study, the results suggest that exposing students to multiple postsecondary schooling options might help them picture a path to mobility through education that they might not otherwise see.”
Yet while there are significant benefits to socioeconomic mobility, there may also be downsides, Destin says. In a review of the research, he describes how adults from disadvantaged backgrounds who experienced educational and economic success may actually experience worse health than their peers who didn’t climb the SES ladder (Destin, M., American Psychologistopens in new window, Vol. 74, No. 2, 2019). “Efforts to support academic achievement may have unintended consequences for physical health,” he says. The persistence that’s necessary to navigate racism and socioeconomic barriers can increase psychological and physiological stress, he adds, and one reason may be that such single-minded focus can isolate students from supportive relationships. Hoping to prevent that trade-off, he and his team are studying whether social support can help buffer the physical effects of stress. In an ongoing study, they are comparing the existing Pathways to Success program with a modified version in which students conceptualize their goals as inherently connected to important relationships and sources of support in their lives. The researchers are measuring biomarkers of inflammation to determine whether this enhanced social support leads to improvements in physical health compared with students in the standard Pathways program. So far, early findings point to yes. “It’s exciting to see initial evidence suggesting that this approach could have a tangible effect on what’s going on in kids’ bodies,” he says.
Keys to success
While Destin’s research spans from theoretical to applied, his lab also sits at the intersection of multiple fields. He oversees graduate students from the university’s Department of Psychology as well as the School of Education and Social Policy. Straddling two departments is a benefit on both sides, he says. “By offering a better understanding of the psychological process, we can really help to advance some of the findings in other fields, such as education and public policy. At the same time, those fields can open up the ways we think about the students’ lives and the systemic factors surrounding them in broader ways than we normally do in psychology,” he says. “Our lab meetings are always so rich with these intersections of thought.”
Destin typically advises two to four doctoral students, a postdoctoral researcher, and anywhere from three to six undergraduates. It’s a tight-knit group, and Destin proudly claims his students as one of the lab’s greatest strengths. “The way they collaborate is so gratifying, and they take the research in so many different directions, sometimes in ways I never could have imagined,” he says.
Destin takes his responsibility to students seriously—not only those he advises at Northwestern but also the students and educators in the partner schools with whom he works, Debrosse says. “Communicating the lab’s findings to the community partners is just as important to Dr. Destin as analyzing the data and writing up our results for publication,” Debrosse says. “And it’s clear that his community partners feel very heard and supported.”
Working with teachers and administrators is an important piece of the puzzle, Destin says. After all, it’s both unrealistic and unfair to put the onus of success on the shoulders of young students. “Young people are surrounded by all sorts of systems of influence. We try to think about the role of teachers, institutions, and broader cultural norms, rather than overemphasizing students’ individual motivations as the key to success,” he says.
Through a combination of lab work and community partnerships, he and his students hope to move the dial for students by giving them the tools they need to thrive. “We want to produce the best possible science,” he adds, “but also make sure that it makes a positive contribution to individuals, to communities, and to society at the same time.”
