Is social heterogeneity in classrooms associated with reduced achievement inequality? The role of help-seeking in peer networks

The inclusion of students from diverse social origins in classrooms might be a strategy to reduce unequal access to social capital along with social origin. This study investigates the relationship between social heterogeneity in classrooms and inequality in student achievement. Additionally, a social network perspective is taken to investigate help-seeking among peers with a different social origin as a possible underlying mechanism. By analyzing large-scale data with 1,671 9th-grade classrooms and 29,597 students in Germany using multilevel regression models, we find that greater social heterogeneity in classrooms increases students’ proportion of cross-social-origin help-seeking ties. Moreover, the alignment between social and ethnic origin (i.e., consolidation) does not moderate the association between social heterogeneity and the proportion of cross-social-origin help-seeking ties. Similarly, the alignment between social origin and sex also has no effect on this association. Furthermore, higher proportions of cross-social-origin help-seeking ties are slightly negatively associated with the achievement gaps between students of the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged social origins. This implies that encouraging cross-social-origin help-seeking can reduce achievement inequality. However, no significant direct association is found between social heterogeneity and achievement inequality. In conclusion, we discuss factors that might hinder social heterogeneity in classrooms from fostering more equal academic outcomes.