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Nature NOT Nurture When It Comes To Academic Achievement
In an idealized world, which factors would influence a student’s likelihood of academic achievement, and how do nature and nurture conspire to dictate those outcomes?
A new study confirms the well-established finding that intelligence — a highly heritable trait — reins supreme in this calculation. But the new research also stakes out a surprisingly powerful role for a slew of personality and other individual traits — including persistence and belief in one’s power — in influencing a child’s educational attainment.
Given the key role that genetic inheritance plays in these other important factors, nature indisputably trumps nurture in determining an adolescent’s level of academic achievement.
In all, inheritance accounts for roughly 62 percent of British students’ performance on a test universally administered at the end of compulsory education, at around the age of 16. The researchers were able to account for three-quarters of that heritability, attributing it to a wide range of factors, including temperament and intelligence. Environmental factors — the quality of teaching, the style of parenting, the challenges or comforts of home, and habits picked up along the way — contribute 26 percent to the likelihood of a student’s academic success.
In Britain, these test scores — not a child’s ability to pay for university education — powerfully influence students’ options for further education.
The researchers asked the teens to describe school and home environments, including such factors as parental monitoring and support and levels of chaos or predictability in both. The twins’ parents were asked to report and rate their children’s behavioral problems, including antisocial behavior, depression and impulsivity.
When they’re large enough, twin studies can be a powerful way to suss out the relative contributions of genetics and environment — nature and nurture — on a given outcome. Since each child was raised in the same home with his or her twin, environmental factors can be roughly assumed to be the same for each pair.
The authors of the PNAS study say their findings may nudge attitudes about education policy, but do not clearly point to reforms. Appreciating the overwhelming role of genetics in determining an adolescent’s academic achievement, for instance, “counters the deplorable tendency to blame teachers and parents rather than recognizing that learning is inherently more difficult for some children,” they wrote.
We may value equality of educational opportunity, for instance, but that should not be confused with equal outcomes, they added.
“Equality of educational opportunity will not get rid of genetic differences between children,” they wrote.
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