Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Education and Individual Student Development: Understanding the Full Picture in the Era of School Choice

Abstract

A primary through-line of the research literature on the correlates of structural diversity in education has focused on intergroup outcomes, including prejudice reduction and improving attitudes toward racial and ethnic out-groups. Over the past two decades, advances in theory have illustrated how individuals may cognitively adapt to ongoing interactions with diverse others, informing new investigations into the potentially beneficial effects of educational diversity for individual development outside the intergroup context and beyond the impacts of more equitable resource distribution. The current article summarizes the state of research on links between children and youth’s experiences in racially and ethnically diverse schools and classrooms and their individual development in academic, social-emotional, and executive function domains. Overall, the emerging research on these individual effects is promising. Implications within the context of increasing support for school choice are discussed.

Keywords

school diversity classroom diversity classroom composition cognitive development social-emotional development cognitive flexibility

In affirming that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision set the stage for the integration of public schools. Since that time, integration efforts have played a significant role in attempts to address what Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) has termed the longstanding and ongoing education debt owed in particular to Black, Latinx, and Native communities. In addition to preventing psychological harms associated with segregation, school integration is thought to support the educational achievement of historically marginalized students through more equitable distribution of key educational resources among students of different backgrounds, including teacher quality, small class sizes, physical space and conditions, materials and technology, and social capital, thereby creating more equal educational opportunities (Graham, 2018; Johnson, 2011; Reardon & Owens, 2014; Wells & Crain, 1994).

The Brown decision was also rendered in the context of contemporary scholarship on the potential benefits of intergroup contact for reducing prejudice and preparing youth to navigate a multicultural society (see Allport, 1954; Williams, 1947). In the decades since, a wealth of empirical evidence has demonstrated that racially and ethnically diverse schools provide more opportunities for the development of cross-race friendships among students (Graham, 2018; Killen et al., 2011; McGlothlin & Killen, 2010) and generally lead to improved intergroup attitudes and competencies among children and youth (see Bigler & Liben, 2007; Eaton & Chirichigno, 2010; Killen et al., 2011; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006; Rutland et al., 2005; Thijs & Verkuyten, 2014; Tropp & Saxena, 2018) that impact their preferences and behaviors into adulthood (Braddock & Del Carmen Gonzalez, 2010; Kurlaender & Yun, 2005; Linn & Welner, 2007; Mickelson & Nkomo, 2012).

Over time, theory around educational diversity has expanded to consider not only mitigating structural inequities, reducing racial disparities, and encouraging positive intergroup relations, but also individual psychological adaptation to intergroup interactions (see Crisp & Turner, 2011; Hodson et al., 2018). Recent perspectives suggest that diversity experience has the potential to impact individual development in addition to intergroup outcomes, including developmental competencies that (a) ostensibly are not closely related children’s evolving understanding of their own and others’ racial and ethnic identities and (b) move beyond the effects of simply “leveling the playing field” of educational opportunity to reduce race-based disparities in academic outcomes. These potential individual effects of diversity fall into several developmental domains. The well-established line of research examining academic achievement in relation to school desegregation has extended to a closer examination of links between diverse school and classroom composition and cognitive and academic skills. Relatively more recently, researchers have begun to study school and classroom diversity in relation to children’s social-emotional competence and well-being, as well as their executive function development, including cognitive flexibility and creativity capacities.

Thus, the possibility of experiencing benefits from educational diversity is not limited to children from historically marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds, but applies to children from majority racial or ethnic groups as well. Exploring this possibility is particularly important in light of simultaneous shifts toward resegregation in US schools (Orfield et al., 2014; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2018) and movements in policy and public support toward school choice and privatization (Cheng et al., 2019; Thompson Dorsey & Roulhac, 2019; Wells et al., 2019). In this context, the case for recommitting to an intentional prioritization of racial and ethnic diversity and integration may depend on the extent to which policymakers and particularly parents see diverse learning environments as conferring benefits on their own children. Further understanding of the full range of individual developmental outcomes related to diversity in education will shape dialogues about the value of racial and ethnic integration across and within schools; thus, the purpose of this article is to summarize the current state of research on links between children’s experiences in racially and ethnically diverse schools and classrooms and their individual development in academic, social-emotional, and executive function domains.

Measuring Diversity

A critical question in this line of research concerns the conceptualization and measurement of racial and ethnic settings (Syed et al., 2018). As observed by Reardon and Owens (2014), segregation and composition are related yet distinct concepts. Differences in the measurement of segregation and composition reflect distinctions in the theoretical basis for hypothesizing links between each and children’s outcomes, as discussed above. Still, there is considerable overlap in the terminology and measurement approaches researchers use in this area (Reardon & Owens, 2014).

Generally, researchers examining the impacts of segregation and desegregation have drawn on an array of measurement strategies, including levels of unevenness, exposure, or isolation between two racial or ethnic groups (Massey & Denton, 1988; Orfield et al., 2014; Reardon & Owens, 2014), relying on simple percentages of majority versus minority students enrolled in a school or classroom (Budescu & Budescu, 2012; Mickelson et al., 2016; Nishina et al., 2019), and using those percentages to categorize schools or classrooms as either segregated or desegregated (Wells & Crain, 1994). The latter approach carries the significant limitation of dichotomizing racial and ethnic categorization, losing potentially valuable information, in particular with regard to variation among students classified as non-white or minority (Syed et al., 2018).

While such dichotomous measures may be useful in some investigations and cultural contexts, nations across the globe are become increasingly multi-ethnic, and recent research focusing on the effects of school and classroom composition has responded by employing measurement approaches that capture multi-group diversity with somewhat more nuance (Budescu & Budescu, 2012; Reardon & Firebaugh, 2002; Syed et al., 2018). As a result, a common approach to measuring contextual racial/ethnic diversity uses Simpson’s index (Simpson, 1949; also known as the Blau or Herfindahl–Hirschman index), which takes into account both the number of groups represented (richness) and the number of representatives in each group (evenness), and can be interpreted as the probability that two randomly selected students from the unit will belong to different groups (see Budescu & Budescu, 2012; Graham, 2016; Syed et al., 2018). A value of zero will represent complete homogeneity, while the maximum possible value of the index depends on the total number of categories and represents a balanced, equal representation of each possible category. For instance, the maximum possible value for two categories will be .50, reflecting an even 50–50 split, whereas the maximum possible value for four categories will be .75, representing even representation across all four groups. This approach has been commonly used in research examining racial and ethnic diversity at both the school level (e.g., Benner & Crosnoe, 2011; Juvonen et al., 2006; Seaton & Yip, 2009; Spivak et al., 2015) and the classroom level (e.g., Benner & Yan, 2015; Graham et al., 2014; Juvonen et al., 2018).

Despite its ubiquity, this index is also limited in that it does not take into account which groups are more and less represented in the context under consideration, and so children of different backgrounds in the same classroom or school, with the same diversity index value, may experience different levels of exposure to in-group and out-group members (Abascal & Baldassarri, 2015; Syed et al., 2018). Similarly, the interpretation of Simpson’s index may differ depending on the particular community and sample under study. For instance, higher diversity as measured by Simpson’s index may be related to larger proportions of white classmates in a study of Latinx youth in New York City, but may be related to higher proportions of students of color for classrooms in a predominantly white suburb. Thus, in aiming to put together the full picture of school and classroom composition effects on child outcomes, the characteristics of study samples must be considered.

Considering Learning Environment Proximity: Schools and Classrooms

Growing from the need to examine the impacts of school desegregation, much of the existing research examining links between diversity and children’s outcomes has focused on the racial and ethnic composition of the schools they attend. Yet within schools, children and youth are sorted into classroom groupings. Compared to the overall school context, classrooms represent more proximal environments in which children interact regularly with peers (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Syed et al., 2018); thus, composition at the classroom level may be more representative of children’s everyday experience interacting with diverse peers and may therefore influence child outcomes to a greater extent (see Hodson et al., 2018; Yip et al., 2019). Classroom environments have the potential to embody the optimal conditions for intergroup contact first proposed by Allport (1954): depending on particular educational practices, students typically hold equal-status positions within the classroom; students often work cooperatively together to fulfill common academic goals; and school policies and educator practices have the power to support and encourage interactions across racial and ethnic lines.

In addition to the developmental implications of proximal classroom environments, the distinction between school and classroom composition is important considering the myriad ways in which diverse student enrollments at the school building level may not translate into diversity within each individual classroom (Clotfelter et al., 2021; Conger, 2005, 2010; Graham, 2016; Wells et al., 2016). Children are not assigned randomly to classrooms, and the policies or decision-making that determine their placement are susceptible to both systematic and human biases (Paufler & Amrein-Beardsley, 2014). For instance, teachers’ preferences and backgrounds and administrators’ preconceptions about students may play a role in determining how students are grouped (Conger, 2005; Kalogrides et al., 2013). Research also indicates that families of color and from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are generally less likely to advocate for particular placements for their children and to have those preferences met, reflecting lower social capital (see, e.g., Caldas & Cornigans, 2015; Horvat et al., 2003; Juvonen, 2018; Kalogrides & Loeb, 2013; McGrath & Kuriloff, 1999).

An additional important mechanism underlying racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic isolation of children within schools is the intentional separation of students based on their prior test performance or perceived levels of ability, known as tracking or ability grouping, or “second-generation segregation” (Mickelson, 2015). These practices often create classrooms and instructional groups with more homogenous composition than the school as a whole, with children of color and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds disproportionately assigned to lower-level tracks or groups (Burris et al., 2009; Clotfelter et al., 2021; Juvonen et al., 2018; Kalogrides & Loeb, 2013; Oakes, 2005). Thus, children attending schools with these policies tend to interact with a less diverse group of peers than would be expected based on their school composition, and may also be affected psychologically by the patterns they observe regarding which students are most represented in higher- and lower-level classes (Carter, 2010; Kogachi & Graham, 2020).

Finally, children play an active role in selecting and shaping their own contexts, and there is ample evidence of children and youth self-segregating in non-classroom spaces in school, such as cafeterias and playgrounds (Carter, 2010; Clack et al., 2005; Conger, 2005; Schofield, 1979; Tatum, 2007). Such purposeful clustering with same-race/ethnicity peers may be natural and psychologically adaptive, particularly for racial or ethnic minority groups, in that it reflects homophily with regard to shared cultural histories and lived experiences (Carter, 2010), and can contribute to ethnic-racial identity development (e.g., Derlan & Umaña-Taylor, 2015), school belonging (e.g., Carter et al., 2017), and resilience in the context of discrimination (e.g., Benner & Wang, 2017), and may be particularly adaptive for students from backgrounds not well-represented in their school context (Graham, 2016; Wilson & Rodkin, 2011). Still, this phenomenon suggests that classrooms represent unique opportunities to intentionally organize diverse groupings and maximize the opportunities for cross-group interaction and relationship-building among children (Conger, 2005; Graham, 2018).

Theoretical Foundations: Psychological Adaptation to Diversity

Over the past two decades, insights from social psychological and developmental science have converged to form a compelling rationale for expecting that interacting with diverse others in school contexts may positively impact developing cognitive and social-emotional capacities. Though some theories focus on social-emotional mechanisms, while others emphasize cognitive adaptations that occur in response to diversity experience, both approaches provide theoretical support for links to outcomes in multiple developmental domains. Furthermore, while these perspectives may apply to several forms of sociocultural diversity, including, for example, gender, LGBTQ identity, social class, and academic needs (Juvonen, 2018), racial and ethnic differences may be particularly salient indicators of group boundaries with associated stereotypes and implications in the broader society. Therefore, meaningful relationships and ongoing interactions across racial and ethnic lines may be particularly impactful experiences for children and youth.

Social-Emotional Pathways

Research grounded in intergroup contact theory (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006) has investigated pathways by which contact with others from different racial and ethnic groups improves intergroup attitudes, finding significant mediating pathways whereby cross-group interactions and friendships lead to decreased anxiety and increased empathy and perspective-taking toward out-group members (Page-Gould et al., 2008; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008). As yet, it is unclear whether decreased interpersonal anxiety and improved perspective-taking capacities as a result of interaction with peers from a particular racial or ethnic group may generalize to children’s interactions with peers from other backgrounds, including their own. At least to the extent that children continue to interact with peers from the same out-group, however, early exposure seems likely to improve later social competence.

Similarly, lines of research on cross-ethnic friendships by Sandra Graham, Jaana Juvonen, and their colleagues suggest that racially and ethnically diverse educational settings may benefit youth’s functioning via the development of close interpersonal ties with peers across racial and ethnic lines. Considerable research has established that more diverse educational settings create opportunities for the development of more cross-ethnic friendships (e.g., Graham, 2018; McGlothlin & Killen, 2010; Quillian & Campbell, 2003). These close relationships may serve to increase feelings of connection and belonging (Juvonen, 2018), expand youth’s circles of moral concern to include racial and ethnic out-group members (Chalik & Rhodes, 2020; Tropp & Barlow, 2018), and may also impact academic functioning by improving students’ subjective perceptions of the school environment (Brown, 2019) and increasing the transmission of social capital related to academic success across group boundaries (Graham, 2018).

Relatedly, greater diversity in educational settings may have subtle impacts on group norms and dynamics in ways that benefit students. First, more equal representation may lead to a greater perceived balance of power between racial and ethnic groups in a school or classroom, such that students are less likely to feel marginalized within that context and therefore feel a greater sense of safety and belonging (Graham, 2018; Juvonen et al., 2006). Furthermore, as discussed by Juvonen (2018), greater diversity among students may correspond with lower conformity pressures as compared to more homogeneous environments, allowing more freedom for individual identity and expression to deviate from contextual norms without social sanction, thereby increasing belonging across diverse students. Thus, diverse schools and classrooms not only provide opportunities to build peer relationships across groups that may translate to improvement in children’s individual capacities for empathy and perspective-taking, but may also lower the risk of social difficulty and conflict.

Cognitive Adaptation

Meanwhile, others have drawn on Jean Piaget’s (1985) theory of cognitive development, and specifically the concept of cognitive disequilibrium, to ground investigations of links between exposure to diversity and academic and social-emotional development (Benner & Crosnoe, 2011; Gurin et al., 2002; Rucinski et al., 2021; Spivak et al., 2015). Interacting with others from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds will often entail encountering life experiences, viewpoints, and values that differ from one’s own, and may even heighten the perception of novelty of others’ ideas or behaviors (Antonio et al., 2004; Tefera et al., 2011). Thus, when students interact with diverse peers in their learning environments, they are challenged to understand and reconcile real or perceived dissimilarities between themselves and others (Benner & Crosnoe, 2011; Wells et al., 2016). These cognitive adaptations may then promote complex thinking, broaden students’ repertoire of problem-solving strategies, and enhance perspective-taking capacities (Brown, 2019; Gurin et al., 2002; Kenworthy et al., 2005; Yip et al., 2019). This theoretical perspective is consistent with findings from Pettigrew and Tropp (2008) that increased empathy and perspective-taking partially mediate the association between intergroup contact and reduced prejudice, and is supported by correlational findings showing positive associations between undergraduates’ self-reports of interaction with diverse peers and ability to take others’ perspectives (Engberg et al., 2003).

The principle of cognitive adaptation also underlies hypothesized links between diversity exposure and executive function capacities such as cognitive flexibility and creativity. The Categorization-Processing-Adaptation-Generalization (CPAG) model, developed by Crisp and Turner (2011), illustrates how cognitive adaptation may occur in response to interaction with others who embody multiple social categories that, according to common social stereotypes, are inconsistent with one another (such as a female engineer or a Black president). Given sufficient motivation and ability, individuals will engage in a process to resolve such inconsistency, involving both the suppression of heuristic thinking associated with stereotypes and the recruitment of more elaborative, generative cognitive strategies to understand others as unique individuals. Recurring interaction with diverse, stereotype-inconsistent others allows the inhibition process to become less effortful, making cognitive resources more available to generate alternative, novel responses—a process that is then generalized to other tasks and domains that require cognitive flexibility and creative problem-solving (Crisp & Turner, 2011; Hodson et al., 2018).

The process outlined by the CPAG model is consistent with social psychological research which demonstrates the role of executive function capacities in suppressing biased responses toward others during cross-race interactions (Monteith, 1993; Richeson & Shelton, 2003; Richeson & Trawalter, 2005). In line with the model’s emphasis on motivation to suppress stereotypical thinking (Crisp & Turner, 2011), studies suggest that the greater one’s level of implicit racial bias and the more motivated one is to inhibit its expression, the greater depletion of executive function resources is observed following a cross-race interaction (Richeson & Shelton, 2003; Richeson & Trawalter, 2005). Furthermore, the theory is consistent with research indicating that bicultural individuals demonstrate higher cognitive complexity and flexibility compared to their monocultural counterparts (Benet-Martinez et al., 2006; Spiegler & Leyendecker, 2017).

In work focusing on cognitive and social-emotional outcomes, the cognitive adaptation perspective has been developed and tested primarily among postsecondary students, supporting affirmative action policies among colleges and universities (Antonio et al., 2004; Bowman, 2010; Engberg et al., 2003; Gurin et al., 2002; Nelson Laird, 2005). Yet the theory has been applied to earlier developmental periods as well (e.g., Spivak et al., 2015), including the transition to formal schooling (e.g., Benner & Crosnoe, 2011). Like the entry into higher education, early school entry at kindergarten (or prekindergarten) represents a key developmental transition, during which one is likely to encounter a more heterogeneous social system than previously experienced (Benner & Crosnoe, 2011).

Young children at the age of school entry are still developing the capacity to classify information and people into multiple categories (Bigler & Liben, 1992; Crisp & Turner, 2011), potentially limiting their appreciation of diversity and contributing to heightened racial bias during this developmental period (Pfeifer et al., 2007; Raabe & Beelmann, 2011). Yet, diverse learning environments may provide practice in applying and strengthening these skills. Daily exposure to racially/ethnically diverse peers allows children to get to know these classmates on an individual basis and perceive them as belonging to multiple social categories that naturally will not be stereotype-consistent. Further, expectations and encouragement from adults to cooperate with classmates may provide motivation for children to learn to relate positively to others who look, talk, or act differently and to actively inhibit impulsive, biased reactions toward others (Crisp & Turner, 2011).

Synthesizing Research Findings

Research on the individual effects of educational diversity is still emerging, and the picture the extant research paints is far from complete. Nevertheless, the evidence for links to individual cognitive, academic, social-emotional, and executive function development, while somewhat mixed, is generally promising.

Diversity, Cognitive Skills, and Academic Achievement

Perhaps the most direct test of the link between diversity experience and cognitive performance has occurred at the postsecondary level. Antonio and colleagues (2004) found evidence from both correlational and experimental approaches that diversity experience positively predicted higher levels of integrative complexity, or the ability to integrate multiple perspectives and dimensions of an issue, among white students. In this study, contributions to a discussion by a Black confederate were perceived as more novel than identical contributions by a white confederate, and led to higher subsequent complex thinking. Thus, even the mere perception of differences between self and other based on racial group membership appeared to benefit participants’ cognitive skills.

The majority of studies examining school and classroom diversity as predictors of cognitive ability have focused on academic achievement outcomes, including reading/language arts and mathematics standardized test scores and overall GPA. Studies of the effects of desegregation in the US over several decades, typically relying on percentages of racial/ethnic minority students in a school, have generally shown small, positive effects on academic performance for Black students (and in some cases, Latinx students), with no deleterious effects for white students (Borman et al., 2004; García & Weiss, 2014; Giersch et al., 2016; Hanushek et al., 2009; Linn & Welner, 2007; Schofield, 1995; Tefera et al., 2011; Wells & Crain, 1994). Comprehensive meta-analytic studies by Roslyn Mickelson and others (2013, 2016, 2020) similarly conclude that learning in integrated schools benefits both math and reading achievement, with small but meaningful average effect sizes. As researchers employ increasingly refined analytic methods to address this question, we have gained increasing confidence that segregation by race and ethnicity tends to depress students’ educational achievement, beyond related effects of income segregation (Mickelson et al., 2016).

Other US studies have focused on the impact of diverse school and classroom composition, typically employing Simpson’s index of diversity (see “Measuring Diversity” above). At the early end of the educational spectrum, Benner and Crosnoe (2011) found that school-level diversity was positively related to kindergarteners’ math and reading skills, controlling for a host of other individual and contextual characteristics across a nationally representative sample. At the opposite end, Tam and Bassett (2004) found that GPAs among first-year students at a diverse university were higher for those who had attended more diverse high schools, controlling for prior academic indicators and high school quality. At the classroom level, there is some evidence that racial and ethnic diversity in elementary classrooms is related to higher reading and math achievement across US (Benner & Yan, 2015; Rasheed et al., 2020), German (Rjosk et al., 2017), and Dutch samples (Hornstra et al., 2015). Additional work has shown positive associations between US middle schoolers’ self-reported daily interactions with peers from other racial and ethnic groups and their GPAs and teacher expectations for educational attainment, consistently for sixth-graders from white, Black, Latinx, Asian, and multi-ethnic backgrounds (Lewis et al., 2018).

Yet the positive association generally identified between diversity and academic achievement is not without exception. A study of largely lower-income and racial/ethnic minority ninth-graders in Los Angeles, for instance, demonstrated that higher school diversity predicted lower student perceptions of school climate, which was in turn related to lower school engagement, which predicted lower academic performance (Benner et al., 2008). In this context, notably at the secondary level, school diversity may have been related to higher levels of racial tension or discrimination (see Bellmore et al., 2012; Benner & Graham, 2013; Seaton & Yip, 2009).

Furthermore, even research showing positive links between diversity and achievement may point toward mediating mechanisms other than children’s psychological adaptation to diverse interactions and relationships. Benner and Yan (2015), for instance, found that the link between classroom diversity and kindergarten reading achievement was mediated by greater parental involvement with school. Overall, more research is needed to understand the specific conditions under which diversity may be associated—positively or negatively—with students’ academic skills, and the pathways by which those effects occur. Still, the accumulation of research evidence over the years has largely supported the hypothesis that integration and diversity have positive effects on cognitive and academic skills for members of both minority and majority groups.

Diversity and Social-Emotional Competencies and Well-Being

As theory linking school and classroom composition to development has expanded, evidence of the importance of children’s social and emotional development has also grown. We now understand that early social-emotional competencies, including interpersonal skills and prosocial behavior as well as levels of internalizing (e.g., depression and anxiety) and externalizing (e.g., aggressive behavior) problems, are closely interrelated with children’s academic skills (Greenberg, 2010; Malecki & Elliott, 2002) and are strong predictors of later life outcomes (e.g., Briggs-Gowan & Carter, 2008; Heckman, 2006; Jones et al., 2015; Olsson et al., 2013). Furthermore, extensive research has demonstrated the potential of schools and classrooms as key contexts in which these competencies can be intentionally nurtured (Durlak et al., 2011; Jones & Bouffard, 2012; Taylor et al., 2017). Whether racial and ethnic diversity in the learning environment plays a role in their development is a question that has increasingly been addressed by scientists within the past two decades.

A handful of studies have examined students’ developing social competence in relation to school and classroom diversity. At the school level, findings have not been promising. For instance, research among a large, nationally representative sample of US kindergarteners, controlling for a number of child-, family-, teacher-, and school-related factors, showed a lack of association between school-level diversity and teacher-reported interpersonal skills (Benner & Crosnoe, 2011). A similar lack of association was found between school diversity and self-reported prosocial behavior among a diverse sample of sixth-graders in urban middle schools in California (Spivak et al., 2015).

At the classroom level, however, there is more consistent evidence for positive associations between racial/ethnic diversity and social-emotional competence. Drawing on the same nationally representative data set as Benner and Crosnoe (2011), Benner and Yan (2015) found a positive association between kindergarten classroom racial/ethnic diversity and teacher reports of children’s interpersonal skills at the end of the school year, controlling for reports at the beginning of the year, though only for children who also had more same-race/ethnicity peers in the classroom (see “Conceptualization and Measurement of Diversity” below). Similarly, positive associations have been found between classroom diversity and teacher reports of social competence and student-teacher closeness at the end of the school year, controlling for earlier measurements, for diverse upper elementary students in New York City (Rucinski et al., 2021). Furthermore, though not directly testing effects of school or classroom composition, studies also indicate that having cross-race friendships within the elementary classroom context is related to higher peer ratings of being liked and being good listeners for Black and white fourth-through sixth-graders (Lease & Blake, 2005) and to higher teacher ratings of inclusiveness and leadership skills among Black, white, Asian, and Latinx fourth-graders (Kawabata & Crick, 2008).

Overall, the lack of significant associations found between racial and ethnic diversity at the school level and children’s growing social competence, paired with consistent positive associations found for diversity at the classroom level, indicate that diversity must be present in children’s proximal educational contexts in order to benefit their developing interpersonal skills (see further discussion below under “Individual Experience Over Time and Context”). In other words, diverse composition at the school level is likely not enough, and children may benefit from consistent interaction with diverse peers in their everyday, immediate environments. Notably, the majority of research investigating links between diversity and social competence have studied children at the elementary school level, where students tend to spend the majority of their time among a single group of peers, rather than moving between classes throughout the day. It may be that composition of the proximal classroom environment is more impactful than school-level composition for children at this younger developmental stage, but more research is required to determine correlates of diversity at different levels and developmental stages.

Other studies have investigated associations between structural diversity and indicators of children’s emotional well-being, internalizing symptoms, and externalizing behaviors. At both the school level and classroom level, evidence is somewhat mixed. Similar to their findings for interpersonal skills, Benner and Crosnoe (2011) found no association between school diversity and kindergarteners’ externalizing behaviors, as reported by teachers. At the classroom level, research has found diversity to be unrelated to Midwestern US fourth-grade children’s peer rejection and teacher-reported internalizing (Kawabata & Crick, 2015) and unrelated to self-reported loneliness among a nationally representative sample of 11–15 year-olds in Denmark (Madsen et al., 2016).

In some cases, possible benefits of diversity for student well-being may be offset by heightened risks for students of color, particularly in regional contexts where higher diversity entails considerably lower proportions of same-ethnic peers (see “Conceptualization and Measurement of Diversity” below). At the secondary level, researchers have found higher school diversity to be related to higher perceptions of discrimination and poorer perceptions of school racial climate among Black, Latinx, and Asian high school students (Benner & Graham, 2013; Seaton & Yip, 2009). For youth from marginalized backgrounds experiencing ethnic discrimination, increased classroom diversity may pose a greater risk to their well-being (Hoglund & Hosan, 2012). Yet negative perceptions of racial climate are not inevitably linked to higher diversity; research among Black, Latinx, Asian, and white middle school students has found higher school diversity to correspond with student perceptions of more fair and equal treatment across racial/ethnic groups by teachers, controlling for key factors including individual race/ethnicity and group representation (Juvonen et al., 2018). In schools and classrooms supporting positive cross-ethnic relations (see “The Role of Educator Practices and School and Classroom Climate” below), diversity may have protective effects for student well-being.

Along these lines, several studies have found higher school diversity to be associated with lower social vulnerability, peer victimization, and loneliness and greater feelings of safety among diverse samples of middle schoolers and high schoolers in California, including large proportions of students of color (Felix & You, 2011; Graham, 2006; Juvonen et al., 2006, 2018). At the elementary level, a significant negative association has been found between classroom diversity and children’s self-reported end-of-year depressive symptoms among diverse New York City third-through fifth-graders, controlling for levels of depressive symptoms earlier in the school year (Rucinski et al., 2021). Studies have also found evidence that more diverse classrooms may be related to lower levels of aggressive behavior in Canadian middle schools (Hoglund & Hosan, 2012). These more promising findings are consistent with recent research linking cross-race friendships to declines in depressive symptoms for Asian and Latino adolescent boys (Kelleghan et al., 2019) as well as previous research supporting links between cross-ethnic friendships and subsequent decreases in victimization and internalizing for Black, white, Asian, and Latinx fourth graders, even when classroom diversity did not predict these outcomes (Kawabata & Crick, 2015); in fact, Graham and colleagues (2014) have found support for cross-ethnic friendships as a mediator of associations between school diversity and student well-being.

Clearly, the research pertaining to links between school and classroom racial/ethnic diversity on social-emotional competence and well-being is somewhat inconclusive. It is notable, though, that the evidence supporting benefits of diversity appears more consistent at the more proximal classroom level, where children and youth are more likely to engage in regular, structured interactions with peers from different backgrounds and are often (though not always) expected to work cooperatively in groups. It is likely that diversity effects differ across specific outcomes, developmental periods, region and community context, and youth’s individual racial and ethnic backgrounds. Overall, diverse schools and classrooms appear to entail a risk of negative racial climate and heightened discrimination, but also hold the potential to boost social-emotional competence and well-being. Below, contextual factors that may play a role in enhancing the positive potential of diversity are discussed.

Diversity, Cognitive Flexibility, and Creativity

Despite the implications of Crisp and Turner’s (2011) model, the evidence for links between diversity exposure and the development of cognitive flexibility and creativity capacities is still emerging. Studies conducted with young adult samples consistently support causal links (Hodson et al., 2018). For instance, experimental research has demonstrated that exposing participants to counter-stereotypes increases performance on cognitive flexibility and creative problem-solving tasks (Gocłowska, et al., 2013; Prati et al., 2015), particularly among individuals with low personal need for structure (Gocłowska & Crisp, 2013; Gocłowska et al., 2014). Other work has shown that forms of multicultural experience, including contact with cross-group friends as well as living abroad and adapting to another culture, may boost creative performance (Leung & Chiu, 2010; Leung et al., 2008; Maddux & Galinsky, 2009; Tadmor et al., 2012) and cognitive flexibility (Bagci et al., 2019; Pauker et al., 2018).

Research on such links among children and youth is limited. One experimental study showed that for native Italian elementary school children, working together in small groups with immigrant peers over three weeks led to higher creative performance on a divergent thinking task compared to those who worked with non-immigrant peers, but only when a communal rather than divisional mindset was emphasized (Vezzali et al., 2016). Meanwhile, preliminary evidence using national US data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-2011 Cohort suggests that higher exposure to classroom racial and ethnic diversity in kindergarten may contribute to increases in cognitive flexibility over the kindergarten school year (Rucinski & Brown, in preparation). Still, despite strong theoretical links, a great deal more research is needed to fully understand the association between structural diversity in education and the development of these capacities.

Emerging Considerations in Studying Diversity-Development Links

As research on the developmental correlates of diversity experience progresses, new approaches and areas of thought have emerged. Three major areas of advancement in theory and empirical work concern the conceptualization and measurement of diversity; the consideration of individual experiences over time and context; and the exploration of interpersonal and contextual factors that may interact with school and classroom composition in predicting cognitive, social-emotional, and executive function development for children and youth.

Conceptualization and Measurement of Diversity

Importantly, the numerical representation of different racial and ethnic groups may serve as a cue for children regarding the status of different groups in the classroom (Graham, 2018; Juvonen et al., 2019; Kogachi & Graham, 2020; Syed et al., 2018). More balanced representation is likely to signal equal social status, while uneven presence in the school or classroom is likely to signal power and status differentials. Research has explored potential benefits of attending a school or classroom with similar peers, particularly for youth from numerical minority or historically marginalized backgrounds (e.g., Brown, 2017; Postmes & Branscombe, 2002). Multiple studies suggest that higher levels of representation of a student’s own racial/ethnic group in their learning environment may lead to increased sense of belonging and lower vulnerability (Carter, 2010; Juvonen et al., 2006, 2018; Madsen et al., 2016; Morales-Chicas & Graham, 2017; Rjosk et al., 2017; Thijs & Verkuyten, 2017), likely due in part to fewer experiences of discrimination (Bellmore et al., 2012). Some scholars have proposed that a “critical mass” of same-race/ethnicity students—some level of meaningful representation—may be needed to serve this protective function (Garces & Jayakumar, 2014; Graham, 2018), though there is little consensus about what level of representation is consistently effective in mitigating feelings of marginalization across contexts and age groups (Juvonen, 2018; Linn & Welner, 2007).

Contextual diversity, particularly as measured by Simpson’s index, is likely to be inversely related to the level of exposure to same-group peers. Thus, consideration of a possible “trade-off” between school and classroom diversity and contact with same-group peers in such contexts is warranted. Researchers have demonstrated the utility of incorporating both diversity and own-group representation into models predicting student outcomes: Benner and Crosnoe (2011) found positive associations of each with kindergarteners’ reading and math scores that appeared to effectively suppress each other when not modeled together, and also found that higher proportions of same-race/ethnicity peers were related to lower externalizing and higher interpersonal skills only when school diversity was also included in their analytic model. Juvonen and colleagues (2018) also found positive effects of middle school diversity for social-emotional well-being when controlling for same-racial/ethnic representation.

Furthermore, as observed by Graham (2018), “no ethnic group is likely to benefit from an ethnically diverse college or K-12 campus if their numbers are too small to combat feelings of isolation or marginalization” (p. 12). Thus, it may be that interaction with diverse peers has beneficial developmental effects only for children whose own racial/ethnic group is sufficiently represented in their environment (Spivak et al., 2015). In line with this moderation hypothesis, Benner and Crosnoe (2011) found that the proportion of same-race/ethnicity peers in school was positively related to reading and math scores only for kindergarteners attending schools with higher levels of diversity. Benner and Yan (2015) also found a positive association between kindergarten classroom racial/ethnic diversity and children’s interpersonal skills (via greater parental involvement), but only for students who had higher proportions of same-race/ethnicity peers in their classrooms. Similarly, in their correlational study of diverse sixth-grade middle schoolers, Spivak and colleagues (2015) found that self-reported engagement in cross-ethnic contact positively predicted their self-reported prosocial behavior, but only in schools with low and moderate (not high) levels of diversity, where same-race/ethnic representation was generally greater.

As work moves forward in this area, scholars have proposed novel approaches to conceptualizing and measuring contextual diversity. Koopmans and Schaeffer (2013), for instance, advocate for assessing out-group diversity (that is, not including an individual’s own racial or ethnic group) alongside measures of own-group representation, thereby reducing collinearity between traditional measures of diversity and proportion of same-race/ethnicity peers. Additionally, several researchers have recognized the utility of assessing youth’s own perceptions of diversity and own-group representation in their schools and classrooms, which may be particularly meaningful for their psychological development (Ghavami et al., 2020; Morales-Chicas & Graham, 2017; Syed et al., 2018). An innovative approach taken by Grütter and her colleagues (2021) involves assessing the strength of “faultlines” in a classroom, capturing the extent to which multiple social categories (e.g., race and gender) overlap, creating homogenous subgroups of students. This method may be particularly useful as scholars in education and development seek to integrate intersectional and multiple identity perspectives into their work (see Ghavami et al., 2020; Jones & Dovidio, 2018; Lei & Rhodes, 2021). Ultimately, methodological choices in the conceptualization and measurement of diversity and composition should be informed by specific research questions as well as the national and regional contexts of individual studies.

Individual Experience Over Time and Context

Recently, scholars have emphasized the need to approach the study of school and classroom racial and ethnic diversity from a developmental perspective (Graham, 2016; Syed et al., 2018; Yip et al., 2019). Particularly in light of divergent findings regarding links between diversity and social-emotional outcomes, increased attention should be paid to the developmental periods during which children encounter diverse peers. Experiences with diversity early in life shape early preferences (e.g., Bar-Haim et al., 2006; Hwang et al., 2020; Yip et al., 2019) as well as later experiences and attitudes (Aboud et al., 2012; Ellison & Powers, 1994; Gaias et al., 2018; Tropp & Prenovost, 2008; Yip et al., 2019) and may be more effective in promoting positive intergroup attitudes than later contact experiences (Killen et al., 2007; McGlothlin & Killen, 2010; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Some evidence points to larger effects of U.S. desegregation for younger versus older children (Linn & Welner, 2007). At the same time, social-cognitive development and increased salience of racial and ethnic identity over middle childhood and adolescence may mean that diversity experience becomes more impactful as children age (Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014; Yip et al., 2019). Furthermore, experiences earlier and later in development are not independent from each other; in interpreting their meta-analytic findings that school racial/ethnic segregation is more strongly related to academic achievement for secondary than for elementary students, Mickelson and her colleagues (2016) attribute this result to the compounded effects of segregation over time.

Indeed, the concept of diversity has evolved to reflect interactions between an individual and their social contexts over time (see Yip et al., 2019; see also Graham, 2016; Jones & Dovidio, 2018; Syed et al., 2018), suggesting that individual characteristics, contextual factors, and change over time should be taken into account in exploring diversity effects. To some extent, studies have begun to look beyond within-year composition and treat exposure to racial/ethnic diversity over time as a dynamic and individual-level construct (Benner & Graham, 2009; Douglass et al., 2014; Juvonen et al., 2018; Kogachi & Graham, 2020). For instance, Douglass and her colleagues (2014) considered school diversity history over elementary, middle, and high school periods as an individual characteristic, examining this student-level construct as a moderator of the association between same-race/ethnicity contact and adolescents’ anxiety symptoms. Other researchers have examined the ethnic diversity of the specific constellation of extracurricular activities that individual students elect to participate in (Knifsend & Juvonen, 2017). Juvonen and her colleagues (2018) have also taken an individualized approach by assessing the average amount of diversity middle school students were exposed to throughout the school day in their four core classes. This student-level diversity exposure was found to moderate associations between school-level diversity and student perceptions of fair and equal treatment by teachers and out-group distance; higher school-level diversity appeared to benefit students’ perceptions only when their actual classes exposed them to levels of diversity that mirrored or exceeded the school level.

Similarly, approaches may focus not on classroom-level or school-level composition, but instead on discrepancies between those levels as reflective of within-school segregation that may be psychologically meaningful for students. For example, Kogachi and Graham (2020) recently found that, for students who were in a numerical minority racial/ethnic group at their middle school (and regardless of individual race/ethnicity), year-to-year changes in their experience of within-school segregation were negatively related to changes in their feelings of belongingness and fairness at school. This methodological approach represents a significant step forward in integrating individual student background, representation at school, proximal classroom experiences, and within-person change over time to understand how racial/ethnic compositional features of the educational setting affect the development of children and youth.

The Roles of Educator Practices and School and Classroom Climate

Researchers have also begun to investigate additional classroom and school characteristics that may either enhance or diminish the effects of interaction with diverse peers (Brown, 2019; Juvonen, 2018; Spivak et al., 2015). Previous meta-analytic work has demonstrated that cooperative classroom goal structures (involving mutually beneficial collaboration between students), compared to more competitive or individualistic structures, tend to promote both academic achievement and positive peer relationships among early adolescents (Roseth et al., 2008). In line with Allport’s (1954) notion that both common goals and institutional support enhance the beneficial effect of intergroup contact experiences for intergroup outcomes, particular educator practices may support positive cross-group interactions and relationship-building in the classroom (see Juvonen et al., 2019; Nishina et al., 2019; Phalet & Baysu, 2020; Thijs & Verkuyten, 2014; Tropp et al., 2016; Williams & Graham, 2019), with meaningful implications for development in cognitive, social-emotional, and executive function domains.

Due to the importance of teachers for creating psychologically safe learning environments (Verschueren & Koomen, 2012), the relational and emotional dynamics created by teachers have been proposed as a moderator of links between diverse composition and child outcomes. For instance, Grütter et al. (2021) recently found that perceiving high levels of care from teachers was related to lower in-group bias in German adolescents’ social preferences, and that the association between classroom compositional features and bias was reduced when students perceived high teacher care. Teachers’ explicit valuing of diversity may also set classroom norms that reduce ethnic discrimination among peers in diverse contexts (Brown, 2019). Furthermore, there is some evidence that racial/ethnic matching between teachers and students may attenuate negative associations between low classroom diversity and elementary children’s academic motivation, engagement, and math and reading competence (Rasheed et al., 2020), suggesting a protective effect of such matching, perhaps due to increased student comfort or perceptions of teacher care and support (Egalite & Kisida, 2018).

In addition to dyadic teacher–student relationships, broader school and classroom climate have also been considered as potential moderators of diversity effects (Juvonen, 2018). A recent study of New York City elementary school children examined the influence of observed classroom climate on the association between classroom diversity and individual social-emotional outcomes, but found no evidence of moderation (Rucinski et al., 2021). However, there is evidence that the broader relational framing of diversity experiences may matter for their associations with development, as seen in Vezzali and colleagues’ (2016) study of children’s creativity after cross-group collaboration under communal versus divisional mindsets. It may be that specific aspects of school and classroom climate more closely tied to inclusivity and multiculturalism are stronger determinants of diversity’s impact on development (see Celeste et al., 2019; Durand, 2020; Nishina et al., 2019; Schwarzenthal et al., 2020). As novel measures are developed targeting school and classroom social dynamics more closely related to cultural diversity and racial equity (see, e.g., Byrd, 2017; Curenton et al., 2020; Jensen et al., 2018), researchers may move toward a more precise understanding of how educators can set the stage for diverse composition to have optimal benefits for student development.

Conclusion and Implications

A primary through-line of the research literature on the correlates of structural diversity in education, beginning in the mid-20th century and continuing over the most recent decades, has focused on intergroup outcomes, including prejudice reduction, improving attitudes toward racial and ethnic out-groups, and promoting civic engagement (see Eaton & Chirichigno, 2010; Mickelson & Nkomo, 2012; Tropp & Saxena, 2018). Thus, the critical need to understand the role of integration in promoting students’ intercultural competence in an increasingly globalized society has to some extent taken precedence over questions about the effects of school and classroom racial and ethnic composition on individual development in other domains. Over the past two decades, advances in theory have illustrated how individuals may cognitively adapt to ongoing interactions with diverse others (Crisp & Turner, 2011; Hodson et al., 2018), informing new investigations into the potentially beneficial effects of educational diversity for individual cognitive, social-emotional, and executive function development.

Overall, the research base for effects in each of these domains is limited, but promising. Years of research on school desegregation in the US have shown small but meaningful positive associations with academic performance for students of color, and new work is being produced examining more proximal, classroom-level racial composition and academic outcomes among children from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Further attention to assessing aspects of cognitive performance in relation to diversity that may not be captured via math and reading test scores will strengthen this literature further. In the social-emotional domain, it seems likely that effects of diversity will vary depending on particular outcomes and samples under study, and it may be especially important to examine diversity in interaction with other dimensions of composition, including, but not limited to, own racial/ethnic representation, racial climate, and discrimination experiences (Nishina et al., 2019). Finally, with regard to executive function outcomes, mounting evidence, including results from experimental studies, demonstrates positive effects of diversity experience and counter-stereotypes for young adults’ cognitive flexibility and creativity performance; these relations still need to be tested among children and youth and with regard to school and classroom composition.

Multiple structures reinforce racial and socioeconomic segregation between communities, schools, and classrooms, limiting the diversity students can experience (Mickelson et al., 2021; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2018). At federal, state, and district levels, these structures can include how school zone and district boundaries are drawn and a lack of interventions to support diversity, which can exacerbate segregation and disparate educational experiences for youth from different backgrounds (Wells et al., 2016, 2019). Increasing empirical support for the multifaceted benefits of racial and ethnic diversity for children and youth may renew support for race-conscious policies that intentionally consider children’s racial and ethnic backgrounds in school and classroom assignment to achieve more heterogeneous groups, and may inform decisions regarding the implementation of ability grouping and tracking.

Still, as public opinion (Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 2017; Cheng et al., 2019) and political will (Orfield et al., 2014; Thompson Dorsey & Roulhac, 2019) increasingly favor school choice policies, the decisions of parents and families have become a primary determinant of school and classroom composition (Mickelson et al., 2016; Wells et al., 2019). Individual preferences, particularly among whites, can amount to macro-level segregation (Kimelberg & Billingham, 2013; Thompson Dorsey & Roulhac, 2019), and accumulating evidence indicates that race-neutral school choice policies and charter schools tend to exacerbate segregation by both race and income (Cobb & Glass, 2009; Mickelson et al., 2018; Monarrez et al., 2020; Orfield et al., 2014; Sohoni & Saporito, 2009). White and higher-SES families face fewer barriers to exercising choice (Mickelson et al., 2018), and on average, white parents’ choices show biases toward enrolling their children in schools with more same-race peers (Billingham & Hunt, 2016; Mickelson et al., 2018).

Even parents who genuinely value diversity experience for their children often perceive a trade-off between diverse composition and school quality, partially attributable to narrow definitions of quality reflecting an overreliance on standardized test scores (Lacireno-Paquet & Brantley, 2008; Roda & Wells, 2013; Wells et al., 2016). Thus, in the era of school choice, when parents choose how highly to prioritize racial and ethnic diversity in their children’s schools and classrooms, their decisions can be informed by understanding the whole picture of potential benefits of diversity experience, including individual effects that are not typically the primary focus of integration efforts or top of mind in these situations. It seems increasingly likely that racial and ethnic diversity does not need to be sacrificed for quality and in fact has the potential to add to a quality education. In being fully informed of the possible developmental benefits of interacting with diverse peers in the school and classroom, families will be empowered to make choices that promote positive outcomes for their own children as well as support efforts to improve equity and intergroup attitudes.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Christina L. Rucinski

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