Generational Status and Academic Performance

This paper examines the relationship between students’ generational status (i.e., first-generation immigrant students compared to second and third-generation students) and academic achievement. Specifically, it explores the role of identity variables including self-concept clarity (an individual’s degree of awareness regarding their personal attributes) and academic identity (a student’s choice to adopt and commit to a set of academic values throughout their academic career). Self-concept clarity was investigated for mediation effects between the generational status of Latinx and Asian students and their GPA (both overall and major-specific). Lastly, generational status was examined as a moderator of the relationship between GPA and the four types of academic identity statuses (achieved, foreclosure, moratorium, and diffusion). The participants were 857 undergraduate students from a southern California university. The results indicate that self-concept clarity did not mediate the relationship between generational status and either form GPA; additionally, generational status did not moderate the relationship between either form of GPA and the hypothesized academic identity sub-constructs. However, the results yield an important finding; there were two interaction effects between generation and each of the moratorium and diffusion identity statuses on overall GPA in both the full dataset and the Asian subsample. Additionally, there was an interaction effect between generation and the moratorium identity on major GPA in the full dataset and a second interaction effect between generation and the diffusion identity on major GPA in the Asian subsample. Lastly, there was a main effect of generational status on students’ overall GPA in the Asian subsample, but not in the Latinx subsample, which is indicative of differences between ethnic groups in terms of first-generation experience. Limitations and future directions are also discussed.