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Considering the evolving and unpredictable job market, adaptability is an important skill for young adults. Such adaptability implies that schools need to teach key social competences, like communication, collaboration, or problem-solving. In this area, a gender gap has consistently been found, showing that boys display social competences less than girls. A large-scale nationwide multilab longitudinal experiment--the ProFAN project--was conducted in France among more than 10,000 vocational high-school students. Its primary goal was to develop and test an intervention promoting a range of psychological and psychosocial variables in vocational high schools, including social competences. This 2-year long, three-wave field experiment compared the effects of a cooperative learning method--the jigsaw classroom, that entails positive goal and resource interdependence--to two control conditions: one that involves cooperation with resource independence, and the other that remains business-as-usual. This article focuses on the differential development of perceived social competences of adolescent boys and girls over time, comparing the three pedagogical methods. Results of longitudinal multilevel modeling replicate the gender gap in perceived social competences and show that this gap widens with time. However, and most importantly, the analyses revealed that such widening of the gender gap was greater in the two control conditions than in the jigsaw condition, in which the evolution of boys' and girls' perceptions of social competences remained similar over time. Contributions to the understanding of the development and teaching of social competences in education settings are discussed.

We conducted three preregistered studies using the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data to provide a worldwide estimation of the standardized test gap between students from lower and higher social classes. We investigated: (a) the degree to which academic anxiety contributes to this gap and (b) the role of country-level income inequality in widening this gap. In Study 1, we used PISA 2003 data (250,000+ students from 41 countries) and demonstrated that anxiety accounts for approximately one-fifth of the performance gap between students with less educated parents and those with more educated parents. Unexpectedly, the social class test gap was weaker in more unequal countries than in more equal countries. In Studies 2a and 2b, we used the PISA 2012 and 2015 data (totaling over a million students from 65 countries and 72 countries, respectively) and differentiated the cultural dimension (parental education, cultural capital) and the economic dimension (economic capital) of social class. Regardless of the dimension, anxiety again accounted for between one-tenth and one-fifth of the performance gap between students from lower and higher social classes. Moreover, (a) the culturally based social class achievement gap was weaker in more unequal than in more equal countries, and (b) the economically based social class achievement gap was larger in more unequal than in more equal countries. Unexpectedly, we also find a robust association between national income inequality and academic anxiety across all three studies. Results are discussed in relation to the multidimensionality of social class and literature on the psychology of income inequality.