Giving Compass' Take:

• New research shows that environmental differences are equally important for wealthy and poor students, contradicting conventional wisdom.

• How did the now-questioned theory of nature and nurture for wealthy and poor students shape education? What further research is needed to understand the nature/nurture dichotomy to better inform education practices?  

• Find out how inequality in England’s school system hurts poor students.

A group of us set out to re-examine the question: Are genetic influences on cognitive abilities larger for children raised in a more advantaged environment? To get that answer, I collaborated with colleagues at Northwestern University and Stanford University.

We analyzed birth and school records of 24,000 twins and nearly 275,000 siblings born in Florida between 1994 and 2002. As did previous researchers who examined genetic and environmental influences of cognitive development, we focused on a very large set of twins and siblings.

Twins and siblings close in age allowed us to disentangle the role of genes and environment in development of cognitive ability. We found no evidence that social class played more of a role in educational performance for poor kids than for rich ones.

While students in the higher income groups performed better than students in the lower income groups, the relative influence of genetic and environmental differences was the same across groups. The results were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read the full article on genes influence in learning for rich and poor students by Jeffrey Roth at The Conversation.