New research from the Twins Early Development Study at King's College London Institute of Psychiatry (IoP), published in PLoS ONE on February 2nd, shows that measures used to judge the effectiveness of schools are partly influenced by genetic factors in students.
The study, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), was conducted by scientists in the UK at the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, King's IoP, and in the US at the University of New Mexico.
The assumption behind measures of school effectiveness is that changes in student performance over time must be explained by the quality of the school environment. So the quality of education can be measured by the amount of improvement over time.
However, using data on school performance over time from 4000 pairs of twins from the Twins Early Development Study the researchers have shown that this and other approaches to assessing school quality do not measure the school environment alone. Perhaps unexpectedly, these measures are also substantially influenced by genetic factors that children bring to the classroom.
Dr. Claire Haworth, a lecturer at the King's IoP and lead author of the study said: "These findings do not mean that educational quality is unimportant, in fact environmental factors were just as important as genetic factors. However, these results do suggest that children bring characteristics to the classroom that influence how well they will take advantage of the quality.
She continues "Consider a classroom full of students being taught by the same teacher. Some children will improve more than other children, even though their educational experience at school is the same."
Future research will aim to identify which characteristics in the child allow them to gain more from their educational experience. High on the list of candidates are motivation, persistence, and self-control, all of which are already known to show genetic as well as environmental influence, and are likely to affect school learning.
This genetic perspective on education suggests moving away from thinking of children as passive recipients of knowledge in education to an active view of learning in which children select, modify and create their own education in part on the basis of their genetic propensities. The research supports the trend towards personalizing education to each child's individual strengths and weaknesses.
Citation:Haworth CMA, Asbury K, Dale PS, Plomin R (2011) Added Value Measures in Education Show Genetic as Well as Environmental Influence. PLoS ONE 6(2):e16006. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016006
Funding: The Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) is supported by a program grant (G0500079) from the United Kingdom Medical Research Council (www.mrc.ac.uk); the work on school environments and academic achievement is supported by grants from the United States National Institutes of Health (HD44454 and HD46167; www.nichd.nih.gov). CMAH is supported by a joint Medical Research Council (MRC), and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) fellowship (G0802681; www.mrc.ac.uk and www.esrc.ac.uk). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Contact: For further information please contact Louise Pratt, Acting PR and Communications Manager King's IoP on +44 20 7848 5378, +44 7850 919020, louise.a.pratt@kcl.ac.uk.
PLEASE LINK TO THE SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE IN ONLINE VERSIONS OF YOUR REPORT (URL goes live after the embargo ends): http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016006
FOR A PRESS-ONLY PREVIEW OF THE FULL ARTICLE, VISIT THE FOLLOWING URL: http://www.plos.org/press/pone-06-01-haworth.pdf
Journal
PLoS ONE