When and why working together benefits first-generation college students: A registered report

Working together (vs. individually) improves the performance of people from working-class contexts. Consequently, teams with a higher (vs. lower) percentage of individuals from working-class contexts perform better. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the way teams work together, leading to a rise in asynchronous and remote teamwork. Here, we ask: Does the way people work together matter for the benefits documented in prior work? In this registered report, we examined meeting mode-that is, the extent to which teams work together synchronously and in-person (vs. asynchronously and remotely)-as an important boundary condition for the performance of people from working-class contexts in teams. We hypothesize and, in exploratory analyses, find preliminary support for the idea that the beneficial effects of working together for students from working-class contexts are diminished when teams work together primarily asynchronously and remotely. Moreover, we tested two competing mechanisms-fit and skills-but did not find support for either pathway, leaving open questions to be examined in future research. Last, we provided the first confirmatory test and extension in a real-world collegiate setting where students from working-class contexts are in the majority (in contrast to prior work where they were in the numerical minority). Taken together, this registered report replicates and extends past research on contextual routes to reduce social class inequalities and sheds light on important boundary conditions. Our research reveals the importance of providing structural opportunities for students to work together synchronously and in-person to enable the beneficial effects of working together for first-generation students to emerge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).