The economic decline of the Great Recession has increased the need for a univer-

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International audienceAlthough approach forms of achievement goals (mastery and performance goals) have been shown to predict academic achievement in college, recent research underscores that these associations are rather weak and not consistently observed. The present study tests students’ social class (in the present research, generational status) as a moderator of the relationships between both mastery-approach goals and performance-approach goals and final grade. One hundred students (45 first-generation students and 55 continuing-generation students, Mage = 18.9, SD = 1.52) answered an achievement goal scale related to one of their classes at the beginning of the year. Their final grade for this class was obtained three months later. As expected, performance-approach goals positively predicted final grade only for upper-class students, while mastery-approach goals tend to do so for lower-class students, supporting the idea that different kinds of motivation could predict students’ achievement depending on their social class

Low socioeconomic status (SES) students have a lower sense of belonging to college than high-SES students. Due to the importance of sense of belonging in the college pathway, understanding the reason for this relation is particularly important. Here, we argue that in addition to having less access to resources, low-SES students in the college context also perceive themselves as having lower prestige than their high-SES counterparts. Thus, in the present research, we tested perceived prestige as a mediator of the link between subjective SES and sense of belonging to college. We conducted 3 studies in 2 different countries (USA and China), and these investigations provided evidence that the lower students’ subjective SES, the lower their self-attributed prestige, and that prestige mediated the relation between students’ subjective SES and their sense of belonging to college. The implications of these findings for understanding the collegiate experience of low-SES students are discussed.