From: drarwingnuttephd@gmail.com   
      
   Nature trumps nurture when it comes to academic achievement, study says   
   By MELISSA HEALY contact the reporter   
      
      
   A study says personality and habits, not just intelligence, determine academic   
   achievement   
   When it comes to academic achievement, nature trumps nurture   
   Let's imagine for a minute that family resources had no impact on the   
   likelihood that an American student would graduate high school and go on to   
   earn a college degree or beyond. In this idealized world, which factors would   
   influence a student's    
   likelihood of academic achievement, and how do nature and nurture conspire to   
   dictate those outcomes?   
      
    Academic achievement   
   Nature or nurture? New research suggests that factors influenced largely by   
   genes -- including but not limited to intelligence -- play the largest role in   
   determining whether a child will flourish academically. (Luis Sinco / Los   
   Angeles Times)   
   A new study confirms the well-established finding that intelligence -- a   
   highly heritable trait -- reigns 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.   
      
   But here's the catch: 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.   
      
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   8   
   In all, inheritance accounts for roughly 62% 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% 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 findings, published Monday in the journal PNAS, are based on a study of   
   6,653 pairs of twins in Britain. The twins -- 2,362 pairs of them identical   
   and 4,291 pairs of them fraternal -- were born in 1994, 1995 and 1996. A   
   multinational team of    
   researchers, led by Eva Krapohl of King's College London, authored the   
   research.   
      
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   In addition to taking the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE)   
   tests, the participants answered a battery of questions, which measured such   
   individual factors as academic enjoyment, engagement with school, optimism,   
   grit, happiness, life    
   satisfaction, physical health, behavior problems and anxiety.   
      
   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.   
      
   cComments   
   "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% to the likelihood of a student's academic success." Last I   
   checked, that was still a    
   pretty big percentage.   
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   AT 1:14 AM OCTOBER 09, 2014   
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   13   
   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.   
      
   Studying identical twins, who share the same DNA, and fraternal twins, who are   
   no more similar than any pair of biological siblings, allows researchers to   
   infer the role of genetics. Researchers can assume environmental factors play   
   a major role when    
   fraternal twins consistently turn out the same despite genetic differences.   
   When identical twins are more similar to each other across traits than are   
   fraternal twins, researchers attribute those likenesses to genetics.   
      
   Calculating the degree of likeness and difference between the nearly 7,000   
   sets of twins, and using past research findings that assign heritability   
   scores for different traits and factors, the researchers were able to   
   determine how heavily genetics and    
   environment contributed to the test outcomes.   
      
   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.   
      
   http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-sn-educational-attainment-   
   enetic-20141006-story.html   
      
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