Children’s Evaluations and Reasoning about Wealth-Based Exclusion in Academic Contexts

Abstract

Although children are aware of socioeconomic inequality from a young age, less is known about how children and adolescents internalize and reason about wealth-based assumptions in academic contexts. Prior developmental research on wealth-based exclusion indicates that older children tend to include low-wealth characters more often than younger children in order to rectify unequal access to opportunity (McGuire et al., 2023), yet also expect high-wealth clubs to be exclusionary towards low-wealth characters (Burkholder et al., 2020). To investigate how children evaluate wealth-based assumptions of math competence, 7-to-15-year-olds (N = 145, Mage = 9.76, 49.66% girls, 37.24% White, 11.72% Black, 8.28% Asian, 6.21% Latino, 25.52% Multiracial, 6.9% other, 4.44% N/A) were recruited from after-school and summer programs in the Mid-Atlantic region. Participants were shown a vignette of a high-wealth child excluding a low-wealth peer, then were asked which child they thought the group would include in a math club. Despite their own negative moral evaluations of wealth-based assumptions, with age, children were more likely to predict group-based exclusion would occur. These findings show that children consider both their own moral judgments and expectations of others, weighing multiple perspectives to understand wealth-based exclusion. Evidence of this higher-level reasoning can inform future intervention for older children and adolescents.